The Assassin
by Zucca
Summary: A human girl is targeted for assassination by the Night World. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

She survived, as it turned out, because her principal had decided to hold a routine fire drill that day.

Some of the students had been slow getting outside and to their assigned positions. The principal had yelled impersonally at everyone over the mobile loudspeaker and told them that they shouldn't be so apathetic, that someday the fire alarm might sound and it would be real. Everyone, teachers and students alike, had stared indifferently at him. Overhead, gray clouds had roiled ominously, though it hadn't actually started to rain yet. It had been cold, too. No one wanted to be outside, and everyone wondered why the principal had been so crazy as to hold a fire drill in November.

"Probably someone on the school board complained," Anne overheard her English teacher, Ms. Sanders, saying to the Spanish teacher. "We haven't done enough drills this year."

The Spanish teacher rolled her eyes and said something that Anne couldn't understand but which sounded very uncomplimentary. Ms. Sanders cleared her throat.

"Everyone back inside now," she directed. Her cheeks were very pink. From the cold, no doubt.

They filed back toward the school doors numbly. There were too many people to fit through the eight doors quickly, and so Anne stood waiting in line, stamping her feet a little to stay warm. She was wearing a light sweater, but it wasn't enough. The temperature had to be near freezing, she thought.

No one looked at her in particular as they waited to get back inside. This didn't disturb Anne. She was used to not standing out in a crowd. She'd decided long ago that she was fated to be very ordinary-looking in life. Her hair was medium-brown and medium-long. Her eyes were also a very ordinary brown. She was on the slender side, but not remarkably so.

Since she'd decided that she was going to be ordinary-looking, she picked perfectly ordinary clothes. She wore jeans and athletic shoes as often as possible. She'd decided that since her body wasn't going to make her stand out in a crowd, she wasn't going to try to compensate with gorgeous clothes. Besides, her mother didn't have the money for anything special. And her father was dead.

So she simply clutched her thin sweater more closely around her and waited impatiently for the crush to thin and for her turn to enter.

The poofing sound from inside the building didn't sound ominous, at first. In fact, she wasn't quite sure that she'd heard anything definite at all. She cocked her head to try to make the noise out better. Most of the other students and teachers around her were doing the same thing.

Then she was hearing shouts and screams, and people started to push backwards. The line she was standing in fell completely out of order. She was jostled against students she didn't know. Someone pushed her hard. She stumbled and almost lost her footing. She was being borne backward and to one side.

Above the building, a column of black smoke was rising lazily into the sky. A crackling noise could barely be heard over the shouts of the other students. The teachers were yelling at everyone to get back, get back to the fire drill positions.

Anne fought her way through the chaos as best she could to join her English class on the grass. A few of her classmates were already there, watching the smoke rise wide-eyed and clutching one another. All the boredom and indifference of the previous few minutes had completely disappeared.

"It's a bomb," she heard Richard say. Richard was smart enough to be in the running to become valedictorian. He sounded stunned. "It's got to be a bomb."

They were standing far enough away from the school to have a good view. The black smoke rose, not steadily but in a column with bigger and smaller puffs. Anne couldn't see what room it was coming from, but she thought it was actually in the wing where her English class was being held. She shuddered, frightened at the thought of what might have happened if they hadn't been having a drill.

"Do you think the principal knew?"

"No, he wouldn't have let us go back inside if it wasn't just a drill."

"Maybe some kid just set off a smoke bomb," someone offered hopefully.

"That's too big to be a smoke bomb."

The column of black smoke was much higher now. Anne could hear the wail of sirens in the distance.

"Maybe it was a big smoke bomb?" Anne could hear the fear in the girl's voice. The disbelief.

One of the other teachers, someone whom Anne didn't know, was yelling at them all to move further back, to make room for the approaching fire trucks. Anne shuffled away with the others. It occurred to her, as it was probably occurring to everyone else, that the fire drill hadn't really been a complete preparation for disaster. At least half her English class was still missing, plus Ms. Sanders herself. They were all supposed to stay together, and Ms. Sanders was supposed to count them and then send one student with the total number to the principal, who was supposed to tally all the numbers and send someone inside to get out any stragglers. . . .

She wouldn't have wanted to go inside to find any stragglers.

A bomb. Not just a bomb threat, which they had all the time before tests because someone hadn't studied and wanted the test to be postponed.

Who would have put a real bomb in the school? What if they'd all been inside when it happened?

She was shivering, now, with deep sick tremors that seemed to come from deep inside her. She followed the other students blindly away from the burning school building and wished she had a cell phone so that she could call her mother and let her know that she was all right. Oh, God, maybe some students weren't all right. . . .

The fire trucks were pulling up. She watched the suited figures run around, attaching hoses and yelling at confused students to get back and away, and she felt as if she'd stepped into a nightmare that couldn't possibly be happening.

A phone was lifted in the darkness. A long string of buttons was pressed.

"Did it work?"

"No. She's still alive."

A soft curse. More irritation than anger underlay the words. Then: "Another bomb would look suspicious, I assume."

"Probably."

"Something more specific, then." A pause. "I'll send you a problem-fixer."

"You'll need to choose one who looks young enough to fit into an American high school. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen at the most."

"I am aware of the age of high school students. Even American ones."

"Sorry." The caller sounded abashed.

"One week."

"Should I—" the caller started to ask.

But only a dial tone, echoing mechanically across the miles, answered him.

He wondered if he could get away with killing the family sitting behind him.

A transatlantic flight was never enjoyable, in his opinion. In fact, he disliked flying quite intensely. The plane's dips and bumps through the air reminded him painfully that he was not in control of his environment. That, in fact, if one of those human vermin had failed to service the plane correctly, or one of the more insane political ones happened to be having a suicidal moment, they might become an expanding fireball in the sky.

And if that happened, his long vampiric life would almost certainly come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

He attempted to stretch his legs out, winced when they hit the back of the seat in front of him, and shifted to put his weight on one hip instead. He was flying in coach, not first class, as he was traveling on Night World business. A nuisance to be in the crowded, packed quarters of the third-class section, but necessary.

Thou Shalt Not Draw Attention to Thyself was a standard Night World axiom. It was also an axiom for assassins, so he had two good reasons to follow it.

He shifted to the other hip, winced at the shrill cry of the three-year-old behind him that rose over even the unending whine of the engines, and wondered if he could get away with killing the child. All humans might be vermin, but human toddlers were particularly unlikeable, in his opinion, having no saving graces whatsoever.

Unfortunately, human women were irrational on the subject, and human men only slightly better. And a jetliner traveling at approximately 500 miles per hour about five miles above the Atlantic Ocean was not suited to a hasty exit.

The inflight movie was the typical garbage created by the vermin, of course, and the music piped through the headset was the same. He had a book—a thriller about assassins, completely unrealistic and all the more charming for its naivete—but he didn't feel like reading it. He was heading west, and therefore it was a daytime flight; he felt like napping, and there was no reason not to, really. So he shut his eyes and allowed his mind to drift past the memories of his last assassination.

She'd been a Daybreaker witch in Rome. A fine city in many ways, though it had regrettably started to expand and sprawl in all directions when that war in the 1940s had ended. Cities should have stayed behind their medieval walls, in his opinion. Limited space would keep down the population: discourage breeding, encourage violent conflict. Disease would spread more easily. If the Night World were lucky, a plague might even break out.

He'd tracked the Daybreaker witch over several days, watching her routine as she went to and from school, as she hung out with her friends. She kept away from the other Night World people in the area, probably hoping that they'd mistake her for human. Witches could get away with that sometimes, since there were a number of lost witches in the world; vampires and shifters, of course, had a harder time disguising their natures.

She was on a mission to convert humans to the Daybreak philosophy, he'd decided, although it didn't really matter what she was doing. He'd been instructed to kill her by dawn on Monday, and that's what he would do.

She went out with her friends on Sunday evening. He waited patiently from a safe vantage point until she told them goodnight and set out for home.

She was a modern girl and a witch; she didn't think she needed to be afraid of the shadows. She was walking happily under the brilliant stars (somewhat obscured by the vast city's light pollution) in the park over Nero's long-vanished Domus Aurea when he stepped up silently behind her, put a hand over her mouth, and hit her with a hard telepathic blow.

Because she was a witch, her own powers protected her, and she didn't fall unconscious right away. She sagged in his arms and gasped slightly, but he had his hand over her mouth to stifle the faint sound. In an instant, he had lifted her neatly and carried her through the park's shadows to the shelter of an arch set into a brick wall. He thought the wall had probably been built by the ancient Romans—it looked old enough—but he wasn't an expert and didn't really care. The shadows fell deeply there, and he waited patiently until midnight had long passed and the traffic on the street below was irregular and light. Whenever he felt her mind begin to stir and reach toward wakefulness, he pushed her firmly back down into unconsciousness.

When he judged it sufficiently quiet outside, he lifted her and carried her through the park to a remote area frequented mostly by drug dealers. He neatly evaded the few who still remained, set his victim down, and used his vampiric strength to shove a rather large rock to one side.

An opening gaped in the earth. He picked up the Daybreaker, slung her ungently over his shoulder, and carefully edged his way down the ladder. He pulled the rock back into place as he descended; it actually had a handhold carved underneath it, where it couldn't be seen by stray vermin.

He woke her up a few minutes later. Her eyes blinked in the single candle's light, and he doubted her night vision was keen enough to see the walls around her, even with her pupils fully dilated. He let her rise and search for an exit that did not exist, except up the ladder by which they'd come. Moving unsteadily, she looked at the decayed mosaics and frescoes that still decorated the room where Nero had held dinner parties almost two millennia ago. The standard paintings on the plaster walls of fowl and fruit alternated with some frescoes that were more lively, and he felt rather than saw the blood rise to her cheeks.

She did not comment on the brownish stains obscuring some of the frescoes. Well, in two millennia, the walls and floor had gained many stains, and the recent brownish ones did not stand out.

She'd been aware of his presence, but she hadn't spoken to him or acknowledged his presence in any way. Perhaps she didn't like vampires. Perhaps her witch powers somehow let her know that he had been sent by Circle Midnight. He let her continue her futile hunt for a way out of the room for some time before he spoke.

"Who have you told about the Night World?"

She turned to face him. Her pupils were fully opened to capture all of the candle's light, and her eyes seemed dark pools in her suntanned face.

"No one."

"You've been here to try to find converts for Daybreak," he said patiently. "Who have you found? Who have you told?"

He didn't care if she'd talked to other Nightworlders, but he'd been given instructions to find out if she'd spoken to any humans.

"No one. You came too soon. I didn't have any time to find anyone."

"You were out with friends tonight," he pointed out.

"Just friends. Not anyone special. I haven't told anyone about the Night World."

He stood and came closer, allowing his walk to take on that peculiar, boneless glide of the predator that stalks its prey. He saw her recognize the implication. A Nightworlder would, naturally. Even a Daybreaker.

He watched her swallow. The ripple ran along her smooth throat, and he smiled.

"There are rules," he told her with false gentleness as he approached. "You know that, don't you?"

She swallowed again before she spoke. "Stupid rules. . . ."

"Yes, but rules are rules." He might have been a saddened father, explaining the harsh truths of life to a child. He was considerably older than her father. "We have to obey them. All of us do."

"Circle Daybreak doesn't believe. . . ."

"Circle Daybreak," he interrupted, not quite as gently as before, "must obey the rules of the Night World the same way that the other circles do. The Night World Council stands above all the circles and governs them all equally. It hands out justice fairly to each. You wouldn't want the Council to let some circles have privileges that the others don't, do you?"

"No, but that's not the point. . . ."

"It is the point." He'd reached her now, was standing so close to her that he could feel the heat of her skin rising to touch his own. Witches were so vermin-like. "Justice demands that all the circles obey the same rules. And one of the rules is that the vermin must never know about the Night World."

"They're not vermin. They're humans. People."

"Humans," he accepted her choice of word with only mild distaste, "if you prefer to call them what they call themselves. The humans must never know about the Night World."

"But that's the whole point of Circle Daybreak, that Nightworlders and humans can live together in peace and harmony."

"Then Circle Daybreak needs to find a new point to organize around," he told her, "because Circle Daybreak is not above Night World law. The Council has decreed that vermin—humans, if you insist on that word—not know about our existence. And that is the law, and you have broken it."

Silence. The candle flickered. On the frescoed wall, the painted eyes of a dead pheasant seemed to gleam with the reflected light.

"I haven't broken it," she said finally. "I haven't told anyone about the Night World."

"I hope you're telling me the truth," he said.

"Why? Because you'll kill me if I'm lying to you?"

"No," he said. He disliked the next part of what he had to say, but he said it anyway. "I've been ordered to kill you anyway. But I also have been ordered to kill anyone you've spoken to, and anyone they may have spoken to in turn, and too much killing could tie me up here in Rome for longer than I'd like to stay."

She looked at him, incredulous.

"You're joking?"

"No."

"But . . . all Circle Daybreak wants is peace and harmony! That's all I've been trying to do. We don't threaten you, you idiot. What we're trying to do is good for everyone, even for you people in Circle Midnight, if you were smart enough to see it."

"Not my decision to make," he told her equably.

"But of course it's your decision. It's everyone's decision. Everyone has to make that decision for themselves."

"That's where you're wrong again," he told her pleasantly. "Some of us respect the law. And obey it."

"It's a stupid law."

He shrugged. "Not my decision to make. It's what it is. That's all."

She stared at him, her dark eyes into his lighter ones, before hers slipped away and danced around the room frantically, trying to spy some means of escape.

He reached out and touched her gently on the shoulder. She started like a frightened deer.

"Sh," he told her. "Don't be afraid."

"Of course I'm afraid, you idiot. You're threatening to kill me."

"Not for a while yet," he told her.

He saw her misunderstand, relax slightly. "What do you mean?"

"You have to tell me first who you've told about the Night World," he told her gently. Implacably.

"No one. I've already told you that."

"But I can't be sure you're not lying. You have every reason to, you know. You don't want me to kill anyone else. Humans, for example, who you think are innocent."

She tried to back away from him, shaking her head. He let her take one step backward, but he kept his grip on her shoulder and allowed her to go no further.

"I've told you I didn't tell anyone. It's the truth. I swear it."

"But you've already broken your promises to the Night World," he said reasonably, "so how can I take your promise as good now?"

"I never made a promise to the Night World."

"You did implicitly, when you became part of it."

"I was born part of it!"

"Then you did, implicitly, when you were born."

"That's nonsense."

He shrugged. "It's the way that the Council has chosen to see things. Not my decision."

"Will you stop saying that!"

"All right," he said easily, taking a step forward so that he made up the distance that she'd put between them only a minute ago.

"I wanted to find my soulmate," she said faintly. "Everyone has a soulmate, you know. Nightworlders are beginning to find their human soulmates. I thought that if I spent more time among humans, I'd find him."

"Isn't the story that everyone has a soulmate somewhere in the world? But only one?"

"Yes. . . ."

"Well, it's a rather big world, isn't it?" he pointed out. "You can hardly hope to search it all. Not even a vampire could do that, not in his entire life."

"Well." She drooped. "I hoped that I could find him here. So I came—"

Her hands came up, suddenly, between them then, a ball of orange fire glowing through her fingers, and she threw the ball at him with all her might—

--and the ball bounced off harmlessly, fizzled, and disappeared.

His lips twitched before he could repress the smile. He was there to kill her, after all, and not to hurt her feelings.

"Daybreakers are terribly stupid," he did allow himself to comment. "There are plenty of witches in Circle Midnight, you know. You didn't think they'd send me to kill you without arming me with protection spells first."

She tried to pull away and run then, but he held her fast.

"I thought you said you weren't going to kill me right now," she said, gasping, when he'd made it very clear that she couldn't escape his grasp.

"I'm not," he told her, a little sadly.

"Well, what are you going to do, then?"

"Ask you a few questions. About whom you've told about the Night World."

"I've already told you!"

"Well," he said, feeling his soul empty and dry as the arid desert, "after I've asked several more times, and you've answered several more times, I'll kill you then. I'll let you die."

Incredulity was in her voice. "Let me—"

He blew out the candle, as the only mercy he could grant her. He'd never found that letting them see in advance what you were going to do really made all that much difference. The pain was persuasive enough in itself.

He left the underground palace just before dawn. The ancient dining room had acquired a few more red stains on its walls. They'd have dried to brown by the time he returned, or another of his fellow assassins did. He'd opened the hidden door in the wall, carried the corpse into the adjoining room that they used as a disposal place, and left it on the pile of bones and decaying corpses there.

One less Daybreaker, one less headache for the Council. Her friends in Daybreak would probably mourn her, but her loss was a good thing, on the whole—it would help convince the others not to break the law themselves. Fewer assassinations, in the long run. Which, in turn, meant more living Nightworlders, and a greater bulwark against the constantly breeding vermin.

Killing a few people could save so many more, in the long run. People who hated and feared assassins never understood that part of their trade. How they protected the Night World, even though it meant doing its dirty work. How they kept pogroms and genocide at bay by strictly enforcing the most important of all the Night World laws: absolute secrecy.

He rather thought that the Mafia, with their law of omerta, would understand.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

It wasn't enough that someone had put a bomb in her English classroom, Anne thought despairingly. No, the police had to question every single one of the students. Again and again.

When the fire had been gotten under control, the firemen had found that the bomb had been hidden in the bottom drawer of Ms. Sanders' desk. They thought that the bottom drawer had been used because it was the biggest, and the bomb probably had been too large to fit in the other drawers.

The FBI had questioned Ms. Sanders first, and she'd said that she had no idea how a bomb had gotten in her desk. She admitted that she didn't usually lock her desk drawers, since she didn't keep anything particularly valuable in them.

She'd also broken down crying, and the principal had given her the day off. But she'd refused to take it, saying that she wasn't guilty of anything and that she wasn't going to go away and hide. Anne thought that was very brave of her, until she actually went to English class and saw her teacher's pale, strained expression. They didn't really get through any lesson that day, and everyone was subdued and nervous.

The FBI had not only questioned Ms. Sanders but also all the other students in the class. They'd particularly focused on Ivy Smith and Jamal Beasley, both of whom had been out sick that day. Anne heard that Ivy and Jamal had been required to go to see a doctor to prove that they really had been sick. She didn't know if the rumor was true or not.

But the FBI had questioned them all, systematically. Apart from one another, and in small groups, and all together. Anne couldn't believe that they suspected that one of the students had put the bomb in the classroom. If the principal hadn't unexpectedly decided to hold a fire drill, they'd all have been hurt. Maybe even killed.

But the FBI talked seriously to them about groups that they might have gotten involved in, suicide pacts and cults and feeling like an outsider and deciding to do something violent to respond to the teasing, and she felt the same sick feeling at the pit of her stomach that she'd felt while watching the black smoke rise from her school to mingle with the cold gray clouds above. The feeling that said that this was real, even though it was a nightmare. A nightmare from which you couldn't wake up.

No one had been killed, though. The school had been lucky. Some students who had been the first to return into the building had inhaled some smoke after the bomb had gone off, but no one had been so near Ms. Sanders' English classroom as to have been really hurt. Most of the parents agreed that it was a miracle that the principal had called a fire drill just then.

Anne's mother had volunteered to pick up Anne after school, but Anne had said she'd be okay and would ride the bus as usual. She hated the bus, but she knew that her mother couldn't get off work easily. Their family was just the two of them, and her mother always said that they needed every penny she could make.

She almost wished she'd given in now and let her mother pick her up. It was a sunny day, though the air was still November-cool, and the other kids packing into the bus were keeping a little away from her. Well, they knew that the FBI had questioned her and every other student in Ms. Sanders' class that day. If the FBI thought she might be a mass murderer, she wasn't surprised that all the other students seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

She was so busy telling herself that it didn't really matter that she'd become a social pariah that she nearly jumped out of her seat when someone sat next to her.

"Hi," the other girl said.

It was Amaranth Klein. Anne knew her only vaguely, as they only had chemistry together, and they sat on opposite sides of the room.

"Hi," she said, trying to pretend that she hadn't just been startled half out of her wits.

"Mind if I sit here?"

"Um. No. Fine."

Amaranth smiled brightly and tossed her blonde hair over her shoulders. She was wearing it loose that day, although Anne knew she usually had it tied back in a braid or a ponytail. Amaranth wasn't one of the athletic girls at the school who played team sports, but she always seemed to have a determined preference for the outdoors. Anne had overheard her sometimes talking about the hikes she took on the weekend. "Sturdy" seemed the best word to fit Amaranth. She wasn't overweight, but everything about her body seemed thick, and her blonde hair was coarse and her face lightly freckled.

The two girls sat together in silence while the rest of the students climbed on the bus. The driver closed the doors and swung out of the parking lot.

Anne's stop was one of the first. Two other guys who lived on the same street usually got off at the same time. When the bus slowed and braked wheezily to a halt at the corner, she grabbed her books and stood up.

"Excuse me," she apologized to Amaranth, who was between her and the aisle.

"Do you mind if I come with you?" Amaranth asked.

"Hunh?" was all Anne could think of to say.

She saw Amaranth's fingers twitch in her lap, and suddenly it occurred to her that it was rude of her to say no. Amaranth had never been nasty to her, and if the other girl wanted to talk to her, there was probably a good reason for it.

"Sure," she said.

With a smile, Amaranth got up. The two girls left together. Some of the other kids gave them curious looks, but Amaranth ignored them, and Anne decided to do the same.

The air outside was cool. As the bus pulled away, Anne started to wonder again what Amaranth was doing there. Not that she minded if the other girl wanted to come over and hang out for a while, but the whole way she'd invited herself along was a bit strange. In fact, Anne couldn't imagine why she'd agreed to hang out with Amaranth, without the slightest idea what they were going to do.

She looked helplessly at the other girl, but Amaranth seemed to know what she was doing.

"Where's your house?" she asked, with a little motion of her fingers again.

"Um." Anne realized she was worrying over nothing. "Over there. That direction."

"Cool. Let's go."

"I heard that you're doing genealogy reports for English," Amaranth said casually, as they walked.

"Um? Yes. Actually, it's sort of a history-English thing. Our history class is giving us extra credit if we can trace our family back for six generations. But Ms. Sanders actually gave us the assignment for our English class. Five pages, double-spaced, due next Friday."

"How's it coming?"

Amaranth shrugged. "So-so. I traced my mother's side of the family back to 1826."

"Cool. How about your father's side?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Really?"

"Well, I wrote the state vital statistics bureau and got my birth certificate in the mail. It was the first time I've ever seen my birth certificate because up to now I used my hospital certificate for stuff. And it didn't include my father's name. And my mother always said that my father's name was John. But my birth certificate said that his name was Hunter Farmer. If you can believe that."

"That's an unusual name," Amaranth agreed.

"It's not just unusual, it's weird. Hunter Farmer. Who could have given their kid a name like that?"

"He probably got teased a lot in school. Unless he had a different name when he was little, and he changed it when he grew up." Amaranth threw Anne a sideways look that she couldn't quite understand.

"Why would he change it to something that weird? I mean, if I were going to change my name, I'd pick something that sounded better. Romantic, or sexy. Not something as dorky as 'Hunter Farmer.'"

"Maybe it was an alias. Maybe he had a secret life."

Anne snorted. "As if."

"Do you remember him at all?"

"No. I never knew him." Anne suddenly felt a wave of depression, the familiar one that she felt whenever she was forced to confess that she not only lived alone with her mother, but that her father was completely and totally absent from her life.

"Do you think he's dead?"

Anne wondered how she could cut off Amaranth's sudden flow of questions about her father without offending the other girl. "I don't know."

"Does he still communicate with you? Or with your mother?"

"No. I didn't even know his real name was Hunter Farmer until I wrote for my birth certificate. That is, if his real name was Hunter and not John. Maybe it's my hospital certificate that's right, and my birth certificate's wrong."

"So you don't know anything at all about your father, right?"

Anne took a deep breath and stopped. They'd almost reached her house, and she suddenly wasn't sure about Amaranth.

"Look," she said, "I don't mean to be rude, and all—"

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Amaranth's fingers move quickly again in that complicated little knot, but she was too agitated to pay attention.

"—but I really don't like talking about my father much. I mean, I don't know anything about him, and he probably wasn't a nice guy, since he didn't stay with my mother and me after I was born, but he's still my father, and I . . . just don't like talking about him. So I'd really rather drop the subject, okay?"

"I didn't mean to upset you," Amaranth said penitently.

Anne saw the other girl's fingers move again.

Amaranth didn't say anything. They stood there on the sidewalk. Anne began to feel slightly sheepish. Amaranth hadn't really been rude, after all. It was natural to be curious about other people's parents. Anne had been curious herself, many times. But she still didn't want to keep talking about her father.

"I don't know anything about him," she said apologetically. "My mother doesn't talk about him. He's a complete mystery to me. And it's sort of hard that I don't know anything about him, nothing at all. I mean . . . I don't cry myself to sleep at night, or anything like that. I'm used to not knowing. But . . . I just don't like to talk about him. You know?"

Amaranth hesitated. Anne suddenly had the feeling that the other girl was weighing her options and trying to come to an important decision.

"Yeah," Amaranth said finally. "Listen. If you really don't know anything about your father—nothing at all—then I need to talk to you."

Anne must have looked puzzled, because Amaranth said again, "Are you sure you don't know anything about him? Nothing at all?"

"Just that his name was John Farmer. Or Hunter Farmer. One or the other."

"And you've never seen him in your life?"

Anne wanted to roll her eyes. "No, never. I just said that."

"Okay." Amaranth seemed to come to a decision. "Is your mother at home?"

"No . . . she's working."

"Can we go inside and talk?"

Anne hesitated and then shrugged. She wasn't sure what Amaranth had in mind, but there wasn't anything she had to do that afternoon. Whatever Amaranth had to say probably wouldn't be any crazier than the plot of her usual afternoon soap.

"Okay," she said, and turned to take the last few steps toward her house.

And, unknowingly, sealed her fate.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"And you call this secret society, this bunch of witches and vampires and shifters, the Night World," Anne said finally. "And you're a witch yourself. Um, you showed me how you can call orange fire. And stuff."

They were sitting in her bedroom, the door discreetly closed, even though no one else was in the house. Amaranth had been explaining the Night World to Anne for the last half hour.

Anne wasn't sure what to make of it, other than that she'd been wrong when she'd thought that whatever Amaranth had to say probably wouldn't be crazier than her favorite soap opera's plot. Witches, vampires, and werewolves—or shifters, as Amaranth called them—were a lot stranger than beautiful amnesiac women who were married for the fifth time in two years and had children who were born a year ago but were already old enough to attend kindergarten.

Well, maybe not that much stranger, now that she thought about it.

"Yes." Amaranth was looking at her closely. "You've never heard about the Night World before?"

"No."

"Well, I've told you now. But you have to keep everything I've said secret, do you understand? Absolutely secret. Because there are people out there who would kill you to keep you from talking about this."

"I don't understand," Anne said slowly. "I mean, why did you tell me about the Night World, if it's such a big secret? Aren't you breaking the rule about secrecy yourself?"

"Yes. But I belong to Circle Daybreak, you see."

"So you believe that humans and Nightworlders can be friends."

"And that the rule about secrecy is so medieval. We don't have to be afraid of one another any more. If we're willing to trust one another, and to respect one another's differences, we can make the world a much better place than it is now."

"But still," Anne said, "why are you telling me this now? If you want all humans to know about Circle Daybreak and the Night World, why don't you just--I don't know-- put an advertisement in the school newspaper, or something? Make an announcement over the school intercom in the morning?"

Amaranth laughed and shifted her position so that one leg was folded beneath her. "We're working in that direction, but we're not ready for that just yet. Right now, we're trying to let humans know one at a time. And in secret."

"Because there are Nightworlders out there who will kill to keep their secrets."

"Right." Amaranth's expression darkened and turned serious. "But you're right. There's a reason why I told you this now. An important reason."

Anne wondered if she was about to be told that she was a lost witch. Her heart leapt a little, because she thought that it would actually be sort of cool to be a witch. But Amaranth was going on.

"That bomb the other day? The one that went off in your English classroom?"

Anne blinked. Whatever she'd expected, it hadn't been this. "Yeah?"

"I think maybe someone was trying to kill you." Amaranth's head was bent, but from what Anne could see of her expression, it was extremely unhappy.

"But—" Anne hardly knew where to start. "Why would anyone try to kill me? I mean, it can't be a Nightworlder, because I didn't even know about the Night World when the bomb went off. And there's no one else. . . . I can't believe. . . ." Her voice trailed off.

But Amaranth was shaking her head grimly. "The Night World would be willing to try to kill you. Because of your father, you see."

"My father? But—I never even knew him?"

"But they don't know that," Amaranth explained. "They don't know how much you know about him. They only know what you told Ivy Greer—in your English class, right?—that your father's name was Hunter Farmer. And Ivy's a Night World witch. She's part of Circle Midnight, though. The bad witches."

"Ivy?" Anne was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea of Ivy being a bad witch who wanted to kill her. Ivy had always been perfectly polite to her, if distant. In fact, now that Anne thought about it, Ivy was really friendly only with a small group of people. A very small group. One that never let anyone else join them, although she'd sometimes seen Amaranth talking to them at lunch. . . .

"Oh my God."

"Goddess have mercy," Amaranth agreed.

"I didn't really tell her anything about my father, though. Ms. Sanders assigned us to one another as buddy reviewers. It's not like I actually talked to her about anything. She just read my report."

"Doesn't matter how she found it. The thing is that she did find out. And she must have told the rest of Circle Midnight, because someone put the bomb in your classroom. I think they meant to kill you."

"But she gave me positive feedback!" The plaintive words came out before Anne could stop herself.

"She probably just wanted you to think she hadn't noticed anything. To get you off your guard."

"But what does it matter who my father is?" Anne asked, a little desperately. "Even if I knew about him, which I don't, what does it matter?"

"Because." Amaranth paused dramatically. "There's always been one type of humans who know about the Night World."

She looked at Anne significantly. Anne stared back.

"Who?"

Amaranth sighed. "I'll give you a hint. Who would Night Worlders be afraid of?"

"Uh—"

"Who would Night World vampires be afraid of?" When Anne still looked doubtful, Amaranth added impatiently, "Don't you watch any TV?"

"Uh . . . Buffy?"

"Exactly!" Amaranth bounced slightly on the bedspread. "Buffy."

"But. I'm not Buffy." Anne tried to imagine herself doing the things she's seen Buffy do, and failed.

"No. But your father was. I mean—" she shook her head as Anne opened her mouth to protest "—I don't mean he was Buffy, but he was a slayer."

"A vampire slayer?"

Amaranth nodded. "Yes. A for-real one, not fictional like Buffy."

"What does a for-real vampire slayer do?" Anne asked slowly. She didn't think she'd like the answer, but if her father was involved, she thought she ought to know.

"He kills vampires, of course."

"Well, yes, but—"

"He kills anyone who he thinks is a vampire," Amaranth elaborated. "It doesn't matter if they're good vampires or bad vampires, if they belong to Circle Daybreak or Circle Midnight. He just kills them all. Because they're vampires, and he thinks vampires are evil."

"My father did that?" Anne asked slowly.

"Yeah." Amaranth looked away for a second. When she turned back to face Anne, her freckled face was sober. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too, for what he did," Anne said, after a pause. It was clear to her, from what Amaranth had told her earlier, that there were good Night Worlders and bad ones, and that it was just prejudice to think that all Night Worlders were evil and needed to be killed. "But what does it have to do with me?" She paused and then guessed, "Are they trying to kill me because they want revenge?"

Amaranth shook her head. "No. Well, probably yes and no. There are a lot of people who would like to get even with Hunter Farmer—or whatever his real name was, that was just what he called himself. But I don't think that's why they're trying to kill you."

"Why, then?"

"Because," Amaranth took a deep breath, "they're afraid that you'll turn out like him. That you'll become a slayer, someday, just like he was."

"But," Anne tried to imagine herself as Buffy again, and failed again, "I'm not a slayer. I could never be a slayer. Even if I wanted to be, and I don't, I wouldn't be good at it. I'm not even good at gym. I can't—I don't know, do high kicks or anything."

"You'd have to be good at using a sword, or a stake, or something like that," Amaranth said. "But I think you're wrong. I think you could be good at it."

"Why?"

"Because it's your heredity. It's in your blood. Your father was a slayer—not just an ordinary vampire hunter, but one who was so good that he was practically a legend in the Night World. And you can probably be that good, too. If you try."

Anne shook her head, a little desperately. "No. I told you, I'm no good at gym. I can't do anything special."

"You can," Amaranth insisted.

"Just because my father did?"

"Why not? Lamia are lamia because their parents are. Witches are witches because their parents are. Shifters are shifters because—well, you get the point. Your father was a slayer, so you'll be a slayer, too. That's what they think, anyway."

"My mother is an administrative assistant. Why don't they think that I'm going to be an administrative assistant instead?" Anne asked, incredulously. "At least I know my mother. I never knew my father. This is stupid."

It seemed monstrously unfair to her at that moment that she'd not only had to grow up without a father, which had been hard enough, but that everyone was still going to think of her as his daughter. His evil daughter, because he'd been evil himself.

Amaranth shrugged and looked away again. "It may be stupid. But they're not going to take the chance, do you see? They think the talent to kill vampires might have been passed down to you. Either genetically, or by means of some book or something. I don't suppose that you have anything that your father left you?"

"No," Anne said shortly. "Nothing. And we've moved six or seven times since I was born, and I've packed and unpacked just about everything we own."

"Well." Amaranth looked slightly disappointed. "That's too bad, actually."

"Why?"

"Because you're going to have to learn to be a slayer."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

"What?" Anne jumped off the bed, nearly tangling her legs in the bedspread in the process. "What are you talking about?"

"You have to become a slayer."

"But why? Slayers are evil! You were just telling me that!"

"Not all slayers are evil," Amaranth insisted. "Rashel isn't evil. Well, not any more."

Amaranth had explained about the famous Night World couples earlier. She'd described Rashel, who'd been a vampire hunter until she'd found that John Quinn, a made vampire, was her soulmate. They'd joined Circle Daybreak and had become a team of hunters that targeted evil vampires. Circle Daybreak's fighting arm, Amaranth had called them.

"You want me to join Rashel and Quinn and be part of Circle Daybreak's fighting arm?" Anne asked incredulously.

"No. You just need to learn to be a slayer to defend yourself. People are trying to kill you, after all. You have to defend yourself."

Anne hesitated and then sat back down on her bed slowly. Her mind was running furiously over what Amaranth had just said.

Defending herself didn't sound bad. Well, it sounded hard—she wasn't a slayer, after all—but it didn't sound bad. If she could defend herself, she could defend other innocent people, too. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

"Well," she said hesitantly. "I guess I could try. I mean, I don't know how good I'd be. But I could try."

"That's all you have to do," Amaranth said earnestly. "There are some people in Daybreak who can train you. And who can help to guard you while you learn."

"Um." Anne still wasn't sure about any of this. "But what if they try to kill me with a bomb again? I mean, even if I do get good at using a sword, or a stake, or whatever, that won't be any good against a bomb."

Amaranth frowned. "You're right. But I don't think they'll use a bomb again."

"Why not? I mean, I'm glad, but . . . why not?"

"Because it was too conspicuous. Even the FBI is investigating now. The Night World doesn't want to be discovered."

"And two bombs in a row would be too much," Anne said slowly. "People would guess that something was up."

"Yeah. Actually, they already guess that something's up. But if there were two bombs in a row, they'd know for sure. So they'd probably try to make your death look like an accident. Like you didn't look both ways while crossing the street, or something."

"So I shouldn't stand too close to the curb for a while," Anne said. She was still having trouble believing that she was having this conversation. Talking about people who were trying to kill her seemed surreal.

"Not when there's anyone around who might push you," Amaranth agreed grimly.

The two girls were silent for a minute.

"But I'll get someone over here right away who can help you," Amaranth finally said. "Don't worry."

Anne doubted she was going to be able to follow that particular piece of advice.

She doubted it even more when Amaranth introduced her to her new bodyguard and fighting teacher an hour later.

"Mary?"

"Mary's one of the shifters in Daybreak," Amaranth explained. "She's the best we have. She'll be able to teach you a lot."

Anne looked dubiously at the other girl.

Mary Lyon was a big girl. Not a fat girl. Just a big one. She didn't quite tower over Anne, but she was definitely taller, and thicker, and heavier. Her hair was tawny colored and short, and her brown eyes had a sleepy look.

Anne had seen her in school many times. Mary was on the track team and could run fast, even though when she wasn't on the track she seemed to move slowly and lazily. She wasn't in any of Anne's classes, though, and Anne had had the impression that Mary had been put in the "ordinary" classes that the teachers were careful not to call remedial.

Mary smiled now at Anne, and something about that sleepy expression wasn't reassuring at all. Anne had to fight an urge to take a step backward.

"Hi," Mary said.

"Hi."

"Mary can shift into a lion," Amaranth explained. "She's the only shifter we have right now who's in Daybreak and who's at our school. So she's absolutely the best person to take care of you."

"Um." Anne really wasn't sure how well this was going to work, no matter how confident Amaranth seemed.

"I told Mary that I thought you should learn how to use a sword first," Amaranth decided. "It's a good all-round weapon against Nightworlders. Mary, did you bring the practice swords?"

"Sure."

"Okay. I'm going to make a couple of calls and see if anyone's noticed a new Nightworlder in town. I'll be back in a couple of hours, sooner if I learn anything." She gave Anne what was probably supposed to be an encouraging smile as she left.

You can do this, Anne told herself. She added practically, You'd better. Or you'll be dead.

Ballpoint pen poised above the form, he hesitated for a minute before writing "Samuel Gregory" in the box marked "Name."

The other boxes were easier for him to fill out. False address, false phone number. The credit card number he gave was for a prepaid card that had been taken out in another false name. There were members of Circle Midnight working for the credit card companies, of course. There were members of Circle Midnight everywhere that Circle Midnight thought they might come in handy.

The hotel clerk gave him such a blindingly bright smile when he returned the completed form that he wondered how thoroughly the hotel management had cowed its employees. No such cheer could possibly be natural. He respected whatever techniques they'd used to make their staff compliant.

"Here you are, sir! Room 310."

He took the plastic keycard, imprinted with a picture of the hotel so stunning that he could barely recognize it as the building in which he was currently standing. More skillful lies.

The clerk was telling him, with an air of breathless eagerness for his comfort, where the elevators were, how he could get to his room, and how the hotel staff as a whole believed that his slightest wish ought to be fulfilled instantly. He wondered if he should take them up on their offer, to the extent of allowing one of them to provide a pint or so of fresh blood. It had been a rather long flight.

He rather thought that the clerk, horrified though she might be, wouldn't quite dare to tell him "no" to his face.

Still, she'd probably call her manager to deal with him, and he had no desire to give anyone any reason to question his nature. He'd been sent to deal with Hunter Farmer's daughter, and part of his job was to be utterly discreet.

And, in the spirit of discretion, he wouldn't eat where he slept. Breakfast in bed might be extremely comfortable, but it wasn't prudent. And since he was attempting to lay a good cover. . . .

"Thank you," he told the clerk. "Could you tell me where there might be a good restaurant?"

She could, and she promptly provided him with an entire color brochure about the restaurants in the area. He accepted it, surveyed it thoughtfully, and then thanked her with a smile. He noticed that her return smile was utterly professional, neither more nor less warm than her smile of greeting had been.

Such plastic people America bred. Or made. Well, he wouldn't stay long. He lifted his suitcase and headed toward the elevators. He'd see his room first and then go out for a bite.

The noise in Anne's ears was unfamiliar, and she jerked awake twice as fast as she'd probably have done otherwise.

"Umhn." Mary leaned over and slapped at the alarm clock. The accusatory beeping fell silent.

"You want the bathroom first?" Mary ran a hand through her tawny hair and yawned.

"That's okay. You can go first."

"Mm." Mary climbed slowly out of bed, grabbed a bathrobe, and stumbled out her bedroom door.

They'd determined last night that Anne was not going to become an expert with the sword any time soon. After a few hours of "training," Anne had successfully acquired only a number of bruises and aching muscles. Mary had shaken her head and said that Anne wasn't going to be capable of defending herself against a vampire any time soon. If ever.

Anne entirely agreed. She felt as if a truck had run over her, backed up, and run over her again. Her entire body hurt. She didn't want to count how many bruises she had. And she hadn't managed to get past Mary's guard even once, and it had been embarrassingly clear how thoroughly the shifter girl had been holding back.

Amaranth had been incredibly disappointed.

"But you're a slayer's daughter!" she'd protested, when she'd returned from making her phone calls.

"I guess I didn't inherit any of his talents. Or maybe he wasn't the famous Hunter Farmer after all," Anne added, a little spitefully.

"You probably just need more practice."

Mary shook her head. "No."

"You don't think so?"

"No," Mary repeated. "Maybe she could become good with a sword after six months of practice."

Anne groaned inwardly.

"But," Mary continued, with the same relentlessness she'd used during sword practice, "she's not going to be ready to defend herself this week. Not against a Nightworlder."

"Maybe there's a spell I could use to help make her a better fighter," Amaranth mused.

"No." Mary sounded very sure. "Not a good idea. Because the assassin might have been given a way to break the spell," she explained, when Amaranth raised her eyebrows. "You don't want to rely on anything during a fight that someone else gave you. You need to depend only on yourself."

"But we've got to do something to protect her!"

"Did you find out anything from your phone calls?" Anne asked hopefully. Maybe Circle Midnight had given up and decided that she wasn't important enough to kill. Maybe the bomb had been enough.

"Sort of. There's a rumor that the Night World council may have sent a vampire assassin. A really good one, too." Amaranth looked a little worried.

Anne felt her stomach sink. "What does 'a really good one' mean?"

"He's probably done this before. Killing Nightworlders who broke the rules. Who fell in love with humans, or who told humans about the Night World."

"Falling in love is bad enough to kill someone for?" Anne couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"Falling in love with a human." Amaranth emphasized the last three words.

"So?"

"So if you're in love with a human, you'll probably tell him or her about the Night World. That's what they think, anyway. And you might get married and have children, and then the children will be half-breeds."

"Half-breeds?" Anne hadn't heard that word since she'd been a fan of the Little House books back in elementary school.

"They think humans are vermin," Amaranth explained, blushing a little. "I mean, it's really prejudiced and all. But that's how they think."

Anne considered for a minute. She could understand, sort of, how people with special powers could look down on people who didn't have them. She didn't much like the thought of being looked down on, but she could sort of understand how the idea had gotten started.

She reminded herself that it wasn't the main point, though. She had to stay focused, had to be practical. The point was that the Night World might have sent an assassin after her, a vampire, someone who knew how to kill because he'd killed before. A specialized, trained killer.

Part of her wanted to get up and practice with the sword again. The other part said that it wasn't any use.

"So what do I do?" she asked. "If I can't be good enough with a sword to stop a vampire assassin, what should I do?" She looked at Mary. "I can't stop a vampire assassin, can I?"

"He'd probably kill you in ten seconds," Mary said bluntly. "Or less."

Anne would have liked to hear a different answer. She repressed a shiver. "Okay, I can't learn how to fight well enough in a few days. What do I do instead?"

Amaranth looked thoughtful. "Well. . . ."

After half an hour of talking, they'd concocted a plan. Anne didn't entirely like it, but it was much better than the other two alternatives she saw—the first being that she sat and waited helplessly for the Night World assassin to arrive, and the second being that she continued with the obviously hopeless sword training.

The plan was that Anne would always be with either Mary, or Amaranth, or some other member of Circle Daybreak who could serve as her bodyguard. They'd have slumber parties, study groups, and whatever else they could think of to explain to their parents why they were always together. Amaranth also thought that she had a spell or two that might prevent their parents from asking too many questions.

"Though I have to be careful with spells and my parents," she explained, "because of course they're witches too, and they can tell what I'm doing a lot of the time. But," and she'd smiled wickedly, "not always."

The first night, they'd agreed, Anne would stay with Mary at Mary's house. They'd ride the bus together to school. School was going to be hard, because Anne didn't have many classes with either Mary or Amaranth, but Amaranth thought she might be able to use a spell to let the school allow her to stay with Anne.

"I'll make them believe that your ankle is sprained, or something," she said confidently, "and that you need me to help carry your books. You can limp around and complain."

"Sounds easy," Anne said, a little ruefully. With all her aches, it wouldn't be hard to fake a sprained ankle.

After class, they'd agreed that Amaranth would go home with Anne. They'd stay at Anne's house that night. They'd go on the same way, never leaving Anne alone, until the assassin was identified and Circle Daybreak could do something about him.

"Circle Daybreak will do something?" Anne had asked. "What?"

"Don't worry about it," Amaranth had said confidently. "They'll be glad of the chance to stop one of Circle Midnight's assassins."

Anne had a sudden wild feeling that she'd stepped into the middle of a Mafia war. One family was battling another, and she was some poor innocent bystander stuck in the middle of it all.

She decided not to ask any questions about what "stopping an assassin" might mean. Of course killing another person wasn't right, but if it was in self-defense, or the defense of someone else who was innocent. . . .

So she'd gone with Mary, and she'd spent the night in a sleeping bag next to Mary's bed. Her sore muscles hurt more than ever, but she told herself that it was a good thing to have sore muscles. Better than being dead, which might be the only other alternative.

Their plan would work. It had to.

"Why did you choose a restaurant to meet me?" he asked Ivy Greer.

It was twilight, and the sky was a darkening blue that seemed to touch everything with its own color. L'heure bleu, the French called it.

"It's good cover. No one I know would expect me to come here. Unless I happened to be hunting, of course."

He caught the implication that she hadn't told her Night World friends that she was working with the assassin sent to kill Farmer's daughter. He wondered why she hadn't. Was she simply unpopular, someone who couldn't count on her friends' support? Or was Circle Daybreak so strong here that the Night World rules were no longer honored?

He looked at her thoughtfully. She was a very pretty girl, with a slender body and brilliantly green eyes. He rather thought that she might be using cosmetic contact lenses to enhance her natural eye color. Or perhaps it was just a spell. Her clothes involved a great deal of leather, and he thought she was trying to appear like a tough, bad girl.

His own clothes were sedate in comparison. He wasn't trying to seem like a bad boy. He usually preferred clothes that said "I am safe, you don't need to be afraid of me."

He caught her studying him as he was studying her. When she raised her lambently green eyes to his, he saw a slight doubt coalescing there.

"You aren't what I expected," she said.

"How not?"

"You're just—" she gestured "—ordinary-looking."

"Shouldn't I be?"

"I always thought an assassin would be, I don't know, scary-looking."

Stupid, he thought, his amusement with her fading. She had said the word "assassin" in a public place, one frequented by vermin, and even though no one had been nearby, he didn't approve of such carelessness.

"I don't scare people," he told her. "I just kill them."

The waitress came by then with their orders—a cheeseburger, fries, and coke for her, black coffee for him—and they fell silent.

"But don't you want to have some fun as well?" Ivy asked, when the vermin had gone to take some other customer's order.

He could hear the genuine curiosity in her voice, and so he answered. "It isn't fun."

"Killing vermin isn't fun? Even when they're threatening us? Our entire people, our way of life? We have to hide all the time, pretend that we're not what we are, keep our powers secret so that they won't lynch us—and you get the chance to right that balance. And you don't enjoy it?"

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Seventeen. Really seventeen," she added, though he hadn't asked. "I'm lamia. From a good family," she added proudly.

How petty, he thought. Such divisions in the Night World as to who was better than whom. Sometimes he wondered whether Nightworlders were really as much better than vermin as they claimed. He had yet to see a human vice that hadn't been practiced by a Nightworlder as well.

"I'm made," he said, careful even now to use only words that could be overheard safely. "And I'm not seventeen."

"How old are you?"

He smiled at her. "Old enough to know that one shouldn't ask such questions of certain people in public."

She flushed. "It doesn't matter. Even if anyone heard anything, my family could take care of it. Or their friends could. We know everyone in town who's a member of the Night—"

He caught her hand quickly, squeezing it hard so that her last word was cut off in a gasp.

"The council isn't happy with any of what's going on," he told her. His voice was pleasant, conversational. No one at any of the other tables would see that anything was wrong. "The bomb at the school was a very bad idea . . . of someone's. Of course, you don't know who would have been so stupid as to create an explosion that would cause the FBI and the state police and county law enforcement and just about everyone else to come to investigate."

He let go her hand. She pulled it back, looking afraid and sullen at the same time.

"No," he went on. "You're just seventeen years old, and a young, innocent high school student."

The glare she shot him might have done some damage if she'd been a witch and had witch powers to put behind it.

He smiled at her, letting his lips part to reveal the very white teeth underneath.

"Young," he reminded her. "And innocent. From my perspective."

He stared at her until finally, reluctantly, her eyes dropped.

He had no illusion that he'd gained control of her indefinitely. People weren't like that. She'd wait until she thought she could challenge him successfully, or she'd set some trap for him. Backstabbing was normal, in Circle Midnight.

But she was seventeen, and he was centuries old, and he'd seen far more backstabbing than she had.

Dispassionately, he lifted his coffee to his lips and took a sip of the thin, foul liquid. Americans had absolutely no sense of how to make coffee. Fortunately, he didn't much care.

"Now," he said gently, setting the cup back down on the fake wood grain of the table, "I want you to tell me everything you know about the slayer's daughter that you found. And I don't want anything made up, or any guesses. Just tell me what you found out, and anything else you know about her for certain."

"And then what?" Ivy asked sullenly.

Yes, she wasn't going to be cowed for long. He hoped she wouldn't get too rebellious. If she seriously interfered with his work, he might have to kill her, too.

"Then I'll do what I was sent to do."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

"I don't know why you still think I should practice sword-fighting with Mary," Anne complained. "I'm obviously not going to turn into Buffy any time soon."

"Maybe not, but learning as much as you can is still a good idea."

Anne didn't quite roll her eyes.

After spending nearly two days with Amaranth, she thought she was beginning to understand the Daybreaker witch. Amaranth was a good person. She was loyal and willing to fight for what she believed was right. She'd warned Anne about the danger she faced from the Night World and had done her best to help Anne learn to defend herself. Anne didn't quite understand why Amaranth had been so generous to her, especially when the Night World council would kill Amaranth, too, for having broken the secrecy rule and having told Anne about the Night World. Even though the Night World council seemed to believe that Anne already knew from her father about the Night World, they'd still kill Amaranth, on general principles.

But although Anne admired Amaranth for some things, she felt uncomfortable about others.

For one thing, Amaranth seemed convinced that Anne had more talent at fighting than Anne believed she did. Anne couldn't imagine what gave Amaranth so much faith in her ability to use a sword, unless it was simply the fact that she was her father's daughter. Either that, or Amaranth had been watching way too many Buffy reruns. Anne found the wooden sword incredibly heavy and tiring just to lift, let alone to use. And it was so long that she practically tripped on it whenever she lowered the tip.

When Anne remembered that Amaranth had said that the Night World would believe that she'd inherit her father's fighting skills because witches inherited witch powers from their parents and lamia inherited lamia ability from their parents and shifters inherited their form from their parents, she wondered if Amaranth believed that Anne had to be a talented vampire slayer because her father had been one. And that bothered Anne. It seemed to her that being a vampire slayer was more like a profession than a natural talent. And you might inherit talents from your parents—just maybe—but you certainly didn't inherit your profession.

Anne didn't want to offend Amaranth, but she wondered whether the Daybreaker had actually set aside all her former Night World prejudices. Even if Amaranth believed she had, was it really true?

That was one thing. And another was that Amaranth didn't seem to understand, not really, what it was like for an ordinary human girl to feel that a Night World assassin was after her. That the Night World council had ordered her death.

Oh, Amaranth was sympathetic, and she was indignant. And just being a Daybreaker was practically the same as being under a death sentence from the Night World council, these days. But Amaranth wasn't afraid, not really, not the way that Anne was afraid.

Anne felt helpless. She felt as if there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that she could do to defend herself. If the assassin showed up, she could throw her textbooks at him. She could run, for all the good that would probably do.

She didn't have a gun, and Amaranth hadn't offered to use her witch powers to get Anne one. She couldn't use the sword. She didn't have a bow and arrow, or a knife, or almost anything else that could be used as a weapon.

She could scream for help if she saw the assassin, and maybe someone would come to help her. Then again, maybe the assassin would also kill anyone who tried to interfere.

She could tell everyone about the Night World, try to convince them that she was under an unfair death sentence. But Amaranth had warned her that Circle Daybreak didn't believe that it was time yet to go public. And Amaranth had also warned her that the Night World had members everywhere, and that if she tried to seek help, she might just be asking someone who was part of the Night World and who would be bound to kill her, as a vermin who knew too much.

Amaranth was confident in her own abilities to protect herself, and those of the other members of her Circle. Anne didn't know: maybe Amaranth was right. Or maybe she was overconfident.

But Anne didn't have any witch powers to use in her own defense. She knew Amaranth and Mary would defend her, but she didn't know if they'd be enough. Two people wasn't a lot, not against a Night World assassin. And they usually weren't with her at the same time, anyway. If the assassin struck quickly, she'd only have one of them there to help her.

One Daybreaker, and her own talents for fighting. And she didn't think that she had any talent for fighting.

But Amaranth brushed all this aside. Her eyes sparkled as she talked about how she and Mary would defend Anne. She seemed to be taking the whole thing as a personal challenge, one that she was sure she'd win.

Anne just wasn't so sure.

But for the time being, everything seemed to be going smoothly. She and Amaranth did their homework. They ate dinner with Anne's mother, who didn't seem very surprised that Amaranth was going to spend the night with them. Amaranth asked if she could be left alone while she made a few mysterious phone calls to her "contacts." When she returned, she looked disappointed, and she told Anne privately that no one knew any more than before. No one had seen a new Nightworlder around. The FBI were still investigating the bomb, but they hadn't found any clues, and they seemed to be ready to give up.

They settled down in Anne's bedroom for the night. Anne stayed awake long after Amaranth's slow breathing showed that the Daybreaker was asleep. Every time she was about to drift off, she saw the smoke rising in big black puffs from the school, or heard Amaranth's cheerful explanation that she'd been marked for death. It was after midnight before she fell asleep, and then she had bad dreams.

When she woke up to the loud radio of her alarm clock, she was almost as disoriented as when she'd woken up at Mary's. She slapped off the alarm and looked at Amaranth, who was stirring sleepily in her sleeping bag.

"Do you want the bathroom first?" Anne asked politely. Amaranth was her bodyguard as well as her guest.

"You can go ahead," Amaranth said. She yawned and turned over, clearly not eager to get up.

Anne wasn't any too eager to get up either. With half-shut eyes, she grabbed for her bathrobe, pushed one arm into one sleeve, and headed for the bathroom while still fumbling to get the other arm in the other sleeve.

As she pushed the bathroom door open, she had just half a second to register something out of place, some flicker of motion in the mirror where no motion should be. Then a hard hand grasped her from behind. A cloth—one of the hand towels?--was pressed to her mouth.

She tried to pull away, but her arm was caught in her bathrobe sleeve, and she couldn't get it free. She kicked out blindly and connected with something, but the only effect her kick had was to hurt her bare foot.

Muzzily, she knew she ought to scream, but her adrenaline rush was fading with frightening rapidity. Everything was slowing down, becoming dark. . . .

The vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory lifted his unconscious prey, slung her over his shoulder, and moved unhurriedly down the hall. He let himself out the front door and walked to his small rental car, which was parked at the curb in front of the house. The sky was turning light in the east, but it was not yet dawn, and the neighbors were not yet leaving for work. There was no need to hurry. Samuel Gregory carefully placed his bundle in the passenger seat of his rental car, climbed in the driver's side, and drove sedately away.

Anne woke up slowly. It was Saturday, and she could sleep late. That was why her alarm hadn't gone off. But she was a little cold, probably because she'd kicked off the covers at some point in the night, and her muscles were still stiff and aching, the way they'd done ever since Mary had tried to train her. . . .

She came fully awake with a start. She wasn't in bed. She was lying on a floor, hard and uncarpeted. Concrete. She sat up and looked around her. Her heart began to pound, and she had to fight not to hyperventilate. Where was she? What had happened?

Slowly, she recognized the unfamiliar shapes around her. She was in the school's science lab. She recognized the lab benches, the stools, the cupboards where the dangerous chemicals were kept locked up. A map of the internal organs of a frog was hanging in front of the blackboard.

She'd been kidnapped. She remembered now: the hands grabbing her, holding her immobile. The towel over her mouth, and her arms caught in her bathrobe. Stupid. Stupid, not to realize that she was still alone in the bathroom, that any assassin would have expected her to be alone and would have taken advantage of her lapse.

Her arm was still not properly in the bathrobe. She shoved it in place now and belted the robe around her. Being dressed made her feel slightly safer. That was probably stupid, but it was true.

She couldn't imagine why anyone would have kidnapped her and then left her in her science classroom. Unless there was another bomb set to go off?

She jumped to her feet and ran to the door. But it was locked. She pulled vainly at the doorknob, then turned around to try the windows.

Immediately behind her, no more than a few inches away, stood a boy. She bumped into him before she could stop herself. He caught her arms, not hard but firmly.

She screamed. She couldn't help herself. It wasn't a very loud scream, but it was definitely a panicked reaction to the boy's presence. How had he gotten there? She hadn't seen him a minute before. It was true the lights in the room were off, but she still should have seen him. When he'd seen her start to stir, he should have said something. But he hadn't. . . .

She pulled herself backward as far as she could. He let her flatten herself against the door. The doorknob jutted into her back. She tried it again, frantically. It was still locked, of course.

"Who are you?" she got out.

His lips twitched, as if he found her choice of questions funny. Maybe he did. Anne didn't care. As far as she was concerned, it was a perfectly good way to start what she was increasingly certain was going to be a very bad relationship.

"You can call me Samuel Gregory." Something about the sharpness of his vowels and the way that his voice didn't soften at the end of each word sounded vaguely foreign.

"Are you—are you the person who kidnapped me?"

"Yes."

She couldn't believe he'd said it, so calmly, without any trace of apology in his voice. For an instant, she wanted to scream again. Or to faint. Or to wake up, because it would be great if this were all a dream. . . .

And suddenly, she wasn't as afraid any more. It was as if remembering all the real nightmares she'd had over the last few days made this waking nightmare easier to bear. It was here, now, and she didn't have to be afraid of it any more.

She lifted her head higher and studied the boy in front of her.

He had a slight twist to his lips, as if he felt that there was something mildly amusing about giving her the opportunity to collect herself and look at him. His hair was very dark, and his skin was pale. He seemed to be wearing dark clothes. Jeans and a t-shirt, nothing special, although it was a little cold for t-shirts. His eyes were dark, too, although she couldn't make out whether they were brown or black. The sun had risen while she'd been unconscious, but the light filtering through the windows was still weak.

He wasn't much taller than she was. All things considered, she didn't think she'd have looked at him twice if she'd passed him on the street.

"You're the assassin. The Night World assassin."

Something flickered across his face then that she couldn't identify. Pity? Resignation? Anticipation? She had no idea what Night World assassins felt. Or even if they felt at all.

He was there to kill her.

"So you know about the Night World," he said.

She thought belatedly that she should have pretended ignorance. Maybe he'd have let her go if she'd just seemed confused and had insisted she didn't know who he was or why he'd try to kidnap her.

Then again, maybe he wouldn't have. And she couldn't have fought back without admitting that she knew he'd been sent to kill her.

"Yes," she said, trying to sound braver than she actually felt. "I know."

"Who told you?"

The question sounded casual, but she was on her guard now.

"My father."

If she could convince him that Amaranth hadn't been involved, at least he wouldn't kill anyone else. She didn't see how she could escape him, but at least she could prevent him from hurting Amaranth and Mary, and the other Daybreakers, whoever they were.

An eyebrow lifted. "Really?"

"Yes." She tried to sound defiant and self-confident, but she had a bad feeling he wasn't fooled.

He stepped back, hooked an ankle around the leg of a stool without taking his eyes off her, drew the stool forward, and perched atop it. There was absolutely no haste to his actions, but something about the graceful way he moved made her shiver. She revised her former opinion that she wouldn't have looked at him twice if she'd passed him on the street.

"Are you really a vampire?" she asked.

He looked amused again. "Yes."

Well, now she'd met a witch, and a shifter, and a vampire. All the major factions of the Night World, according to Amaranth. Wonderful; she could die with her knowledge complete.

"So your father told you about the Night World," he said comfortably, when she didn't seem inclined to say anything else.

"Yes. My father was Hunter Farmer," Anne explained, deciding that she might as well go for broke and tell him everything. "But I'm sure you know that."

"Oh, yes." His dark eyes studied her. "There's a problem, though."

"What?"

"Your father died years ago. About the time you were born, in fact. So how could he have told you so much about the Night World?"

Anne's heart, which had been coming close to a normal rhythm, lurched again.

"He left a diary," she said, trying to sound casual. "He told me everything in it."

"Ah."

She had a sinking feeling that he didn't believe her. Well, it actually hadn't been the smartest thing to say. She didn't know any guys who kept diaries. She should have said that he'd left a letter for his unborn daughter. That probably would have sounded better.

"And where is this diary?"

"I burned it," Anne said promptly.

Samuel Gregory laughed.

For a few seconds, Anne couldn't believe it. She had been knocked unconscious and kidnapped by a Night World assassin. He'd brought her to her school, of all places—why had he done that?—and locked them both in her science classroom. He was planning to kill her because she was the daughter of a dead slayer, even though he apparently didn't know or care whether she'd ever killed anyone herself. She couldn't imagine how she could escape. And now he was laughing?

He didn't laugh for very long, but as his lips straightened, she could see them still twitching at the corners, and she realized that he'd found her answer genuinely funny. He wasn't just trying to humiliate her.

Somehow that made it much worse, and much more humiliating.

"So I can't find the diary."

"That's right."

"It isn't even worth my time to look for it."

"That's right."

"Your father's legacy to you. One of the few things he left you. You burned it."

"For security reasons," Anne said with dignity. The government always said that, so she figured she could say it as well.

"For security reasons," he agreed gravely. His lips twitched again, just at one corner.

"You can kill me," she told him. "I know you're going to. But that's all you can do. I learned everything I know about the Night World from my father, and you can't prove anything else."

She expected that he'd be angry, that he'd tell her she was wrong. But he just looked at her, and again she had the sense that an expression that she couldn't quite grasp slid rapidly over his features and disappeared.

She could see him better now, she realized. The light was growing stronger.

"So there," she finished. It was a childish thing to say, but she was running out of defiant words. In spite of her best efforts to be brave, she could feel her knees beginning to tremble beneath her. She hoped her bathrobe hid the shaking, but she couldn't drop her eyes to look.

"Anne," he said gently. She hadn't heard him say her name before, and it sounded unnatural, somehow, on his lips.

"I don't need to prove anything."

She could feel some of the tension going out of her. He wasn't a monster, then. Just someone who disagreed with Circle Daybreak, but who did so honestly, who was willing to fight within civilized rules. Amaranth had dropped dark hints about how terrible the members of Circle Midnight could be, but this boy wasn't terrible. He'd kill her, yes, but he'd accept her word about how she'd learned about the Night World. No one else had to die.

It hadn't occurred to her that Samuel Gregory's words might have more than one meaning. She stood a little straighter and took a step away from the door. Toward him.

"So," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. "Are you going to kill me here? Right now?"

She couldn't read the look in his dark eyes, but she could see their color now. A very dark brown. Not true black.

"I need to ask you a few more questions first," he said.

"I don't have anything to tell you. I burned everything. There's nothing left but what's in my head. If you kill me, you'll have destroyed everything that my father left behind."

She could hardly believe what she was saying. That she was practically asking him to kill her. But it would be worth it, she was vaguely certain, if she could save Amaranth and Mary. And, good god, her mother, what if this vampire assassin decided to kill her mother because he thought she might know something too. . . .

"It's not that easy."

"It isn't?" She was almost touching him now. "I thought it was easy for vampires to kill. And you're an assassin. Don't tell me you haven't killed anyone before?"

In spite of herself, her heart leapt at the thought that he might never have killed before, that he might be reluctant to kill her now. That she might escape, in spite of everything.

He was shaking his head, and her momentary hope plummeted. She thought she was going to be sick. If he didn't do something soon, she'd faint, or vomit, or scream. She could feel her pajamas clinging to her with sweat.

"I have done this before. And that's why I know a lie when I hear it."

She couldn't speak. She stared at him mutely, and he went on.

"Your father didn't leave you a diary. You just found out who your father was. You didn't even know that until a few days ago. Someone else told you about the Night World. I need to know who that person is."

"So you can kill them, too?" she challenged him.

"Yes."

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. This wasn't happening. This simply wasn't happening.

"I won't tell you anything."

He smiled, a quick twist of his lips that had no mirth to it at all. "Yes. You will."

She jerked away from him then, but his hand shot out swifter than she could move. He caught her wrist—

--and then she was overcome with the sense of his presence all about her. The science classroom around her seemed to fade away.

It lasted for only an instant, and then he'd dropped her wrist as if he'd inadvertently touched red-hot iron. She blinked, orienting herself.

He was standing an arm's length from her, his dark brown eyes wide. This time, she could read the expression on his face. It was one of absolute horror and disgust, as if he were looking at a mutilated corpse, or a nest of maggots.

She wondered what was behind her to have caused that expression, but she didn't dare turn around. Her head was still spinning dizzily, and she stood still, trembling, and waited for whatever he was going to do next. She didn't think she could stand up much longer, still less run away.

"Soulmate," he spat at her, and the same loathing was in his voice.

"Soulmate?" Amaranth had told her about soulmates, she remembered that, but she couldn't grasp the memory.

"Damn you," he said, with absolute conviction.

Then he turned and darted away, so quickly that she could barely see him, to the windows at the back of the classroom. With that same eerie grace, he was suddenly on the sill, crouching like a cat, pulling one window sharply. It opened. In an instant, he slithered through the narrow opening and was gone.

Anne was left standing alone, wrapped in her bathrobe and shivering, in her high school's science classroom.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

She got detention, of course. She didn't care. Detention, she'd discovered, was not the worst thing in the world. Being kidnapped and threatened with death by a Night World assassin was considerably higher on the list.

Because of the bomb, the FBI also wanted to question her. Why had she come to the school before it opened? What had she been doing in the science classroom? Had she been trying to make something? Another bomb, maybe? Was she the person who had planted the bomb in her English classroom a few days ago? Or maybe she was a copycat, someone who imitated a previous crime?

Anne waited, refusing to say anything to anyone, until Amaranth showed up at the school, her cheeks pink with running. Amaranth started to talk to the FBI agents and the principal, making odd little motions with her fingers as she did so, and after a while the adults all started to nod. Yes, it was wrong that Anne had ended up in the science classroom. But she hadn't done anything that was a crime. There weren't any signs that she had been making a bomb. There was no reason to suspect her of anything other than coming to school before the school opened. Maybe she'd picked a lock or something, which was wrong, but she hadn't really done any damage. It was just one of those things that teenagers did sometimes, for odd reasons known only to themselves. Not worth investigating seriously. Just one of those teenage things.

In spite of Amaranth's best efforts, though, the principal still frowned and gave Anne detention. And because she had to go home and change out of her bathrobe, she missed her first class and got additional detention. Amaranth, who missed her first class as well while she escorted Anne home and back to school, also got detention.

"So what happened?" Amaranth hissed, as they sat in the detention room after school, ostensibly doing their homework. "How did he get you away? How did you escape?"

Anne filled her in as best she could.

"It sounds like he used his vampire powers to knock you unconscious," Amaranth judged. "All vampires can hypnotize humans, and the strong ones can knock you out. It figures that he's strong. An assassin would be." She snickered suddenly. "And the name he gave you!"

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's not his real name." Amaranth sounded very sure.

"How do you know?"

"All Nightworlders know. It's from Kafka. Only reversed. Franz Kafka," she explained, when Anne looked blank. "He wrote short stories in the early twentieth century. And one of the stories he wrote was called Metamorphosis. The first sentence says something like 'Gregor Samsa woke up and found that he'd become a giant vermin.'"

Anne was lost. "Who's Gregor Samsa?"

"The main character. Anyway, the story's about how he woke up and found that he'd turned into a giant cockroach, or a giant bug of some kind. Vermin."

"And the assassin reversed the name," Anne put the pieces together slowly. "Instead of calling himself Gregor Samsa, he called himself Samuel Gregory. Almost the same, but in reverse."

"He must be a made vampire, not a lamia. He chose the name because, instead of turning from a person into a vermin, he turned from a vermin into a person. At least, that's probably how he thinks of it."

Anne turned over the idea in her mind. It sounded right. It disturbed her that anyone would choose an alias for himself that said he thought that he'd been vermin once. After all, she was human, and she didn't think of herself as vermin. Though the look on Samuel's face when he'd flung himself away from her, at the end. . . .

"What did he mean when he said 'soulmate'?" Anne asked. "When he looked at me—and I guess he was looking at me, and not something behind me—and said 'soulmate,' as if something horrible had happened?"

She'd had time to collect herself and to remember exactly what Amaranth had told her about soulmates. That Nightworlders were increasingly finding that they were soulmates with humans. That soulmates were two people who were meant for one another, and only for one another, and that if one of them died, the other one would feel as if all the joy had gone out of his world, forever.

"Tell me exactly what happened when he grabbed your wrist," Amaranth said. "Exactly."

Anne described, for the second time, the strange feeling of being surrounded by Samuel Gregory's presence. How the ordinary physical world around her had seemed to fall away. And then how the strange feeling had ended abruptly when Samuel Gregory had dropped her wrist and looked as if he'd seen the worst thing that could exist in this world.

"Wow," Amaranth said softly. "I can't believe it."

"What?"

"I mean, it's really too unbelievable."

"What?" Anne all but cried.

The teacher supervising detention sent her a warning glance. Anne lowered her head hastily and pretended to be absorbed in solving an algebraic equation.

"You're his soulmate. A human and an assassin from Circle Midnight." Amaranth laughed softly. The detention teacher didn't seem to mind when Amaranth made noise, Anne noticed.

"No one is going to believe this. Absolutely no one."

"I don't believe it either," Anne said firmly.

But something at the back of her brain was disagreeing. Was telling her that in those few brief instants, she'd experienced a connection to her soulmate. It wasn't just that what she'd felt exactly matched what Amaranth had described soulmates as feeling when they met. Something in her simply knew, past all doubt, that Samuel Gregory was her soulmate.

Her soulmate was an evil vampire assassin out to kill her.

"This isn't fair," she muttered. "This just isn't fair."

"He's your soulmate," Amaranth insisted. "And it's a good thing, actually."

"Why? How could this possibly be a good thing?"

"Well. You're alive, right? He didn't kill you after all."

Anne felt sick. Amaranth seemed so calm about the whole idea that she'd been about to die. . . .

"He didn't kill you because you're his soulmate," Amaranth explained. She sounded happy. "He can't kill you now that he knows you're his soulmate. So you're safe."

"I . . . don't know that it's that easy." Anne was sure it wasn't going to be that easy.

"He can't kill you now," Amaranth repeated, sounding very confident. "It would be like killing a part of himself. He won't do that."

"I don't know. . . ."

"Maybe he'll even want to join Circle Daybreak! That would be so cool for us! Circle Midnight would be sick with jealousy." Amaranth was actually getting excited, Anne saw. "Every time they lose one of their people to us, they've got to be terrified. Their world's ending, and we're the future. We're what the world is going to be. Humans and Nightworlders living together in harmony. It's coming, Anne, and you're going to be part of it because you're soulmates with a Nightworlder. He wouldn't leave Circle Midnight except for you. You are so lucky to be a part of this."

For the first time, Anne wondered seriously if Nightworlders and humans could really live in harmony together. She could still feel the towel pressed firmly to her mouth, iron hands holding her still, Samuel Gregory's mind pushing hers down into darkness as he prepared to take her away to die. . . .

She didn't want to hurt Amaranth's feelings. It also occurred to her, suddenly, that it wasn't quite safe for her to hurt Amaranth's feelings. Not only was Amaranth one of the two Nightworlders standing between her and a Night World assassin, but Amaranth was a witch who could cast spells on other people. She'd seen Amaranth do it. And Anne didn't have any powers of her own.

If she and Amaranth had a fight, which one of them would win? And could you really feel yourself equal to a person who'd always win a fight with you? She didn't know.

"We really shouldn't be talking about this here," she hedged. "Someone might overhear us."

"If anyone does, I'll just make them forget," Amaranth promised blithely. But she didn't insist on continuing the conversation. Anne focused on her algebra with secret relief.

Lying on the queen-sized bed in his hotel bedroom, the heavy curtains firmly shut against the harsh sunlight, the vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory tried to figure out how he could repair what had gone disastrously wrong with his assignment to kill Hunter Farmer's daughter.

He'd been sent to kill her. He'd been sent to find out what she knew, who she'd learned it from, and to kill her and everyone who had given her the information about the Night World. Ivy had told him she suspected Amaranth Klein and Mary Lyon were Daybreak sympathizers.

He knew, without hiding it from himself, that finding out how Anne knew about the Night World meant torturing her. When she gave him names of the Daybreakers she'd been in contact with, he'd have to find and torture them too. The more names he got, the more Daybreakers could be tracked down and killed. It was reasonably certain that they were all guilty of breaking Night World law. It was part of Daybreak's philosophy to tell humans about the Night World. Whether they'd actually done so or not hardly mattered. At the very least, those that hadn't told humans about the Night World encouraged other Daybreakers to do so.

His job was to kill the Daybreakers in this particular town, including Anne, and to report any information he got about Daybreakers elsewhere to the Night World council. Which would take his report into consideration, and the reports of spies and other assassins like him, and decide where to strike next.

Unfortunately, he had turned out to be soulmates with his target. And this was very, very bad.

Lying on the garishly colored bedspread, he examined his feelings dispassionately. What did he feel about Anne, the newly discovered daughter of one of the most ruthless slayers of the twentieth century? What did he want to do about her? About his unexpected and undesired connection to a vermin?

He wished she'd never been born so that she'd never have presented him with his current dilemma. Unfortunately, that was no longer an option.

He decided, slowly, that the soulmate connection between them wasn't his fault. He hadn't done anything to deserve it; it wasn't some horrible punishment placed upon him for having snuck sweets out of the kitchen when he'd been a human boy. When he'd been a vermin himself, before he'd changed to become a full-fledged Nightworlder.

He hadn't been quite sure before what to believe about the reports of Nightworlders finding human soulmates. On the one hand, the reports were horrific, disgusting. Nightworlders should not be involved with humans. Night World rules reflected this necessary division between the two worlds.

But on the other hands, there had been so many reports that it seemed unlikely, in fairness, to be propaganda that Daybreak had cooked up. No, he could believe that Nightworlders were really finding themselves to be soulmates with vermin.

That didn't mean it was a good thing, though. Daybreak said it was. But he rather thought it was like a plague. Something that was spreading through the entire Night World population, one unhappy victim at a time. Weakening their society. Causing dissension, just when the vermin's technology had reached such heights that it was becoming very hard to continue the masquerade.

Well, he was a plague victim. Not his fault. It wasn't your fault if you got ill.

What was important, though, was how you responded to illness. With courage and wisdom? Or with weakness and folly? He needed to find the right way to respond to the disaster which had overtaken him.

He couldn't do what so many weaker Nightworlders did, of course. He certainly wasn't going to join Circle Daybreak and try to take up some life with his soulmate. He was an assassin, someone who killed Daybreakers. Not one of them.

In fact, he thought dispassionately, he didn't really want to live with his soulmate. He'd rather never see her again. She was just a girl, still in her teens, and naive. He'd seen that when she'd thought he would stop at killing her alone. She had some courage, he'd admit, but he really didn't care whether she had courage or not. She was misguided, and she was involved with the equally misguided Daybreakers. He was centuries old, and he was an assassin by his own free choice, and he had no intention of tying himself to a naive high school girl who was either vermin or a Daybreaker, whichever way you wanted to look at it.

That having been said, he didn't particularly want to kill her either. Whatever this mysterious disease of soulmates was, everyone agreed that bad things happened to the survivor if one of the pair died. He didn't want to suffer any more from the plague than he already had at the embarrassment of finding that he had a vermin soulmate.

In addition, he didn't really have any ill-will for her. He doubted that the soulmate connection was her fault, any more than it was his. She just had the bad luck to be his soulmate, and to be Hunter Farmer's daughter. He'd seen her and watched the way she'd moved in the science classroom, clumsy in the way of ordinary humans, and he knew that she wasn't a slayer herself. Maybe she had the talent to become one, maybe not. Right now, she was just an ordinary vermin, even if the Night World council thought it too much of a risk to let her live.

But what bothered him most was that he hadn't simply been assigned to kill her. He could kill quickly, so quickly that the victim never knew what was happening. Like most vampires, he usually killed with nothing but his own body for a weapon. But he knew how to use weapons too. He was, after all, an assassin.

A single gunshot through her brain and she'd die without knowing she'd been hit.

Or he could use his telepathic powers to knock her unconscious and then strangle her. Again, she'd never know what was happening, never feel any pain, never suffer.

But he hadn't been assigned just to kill her. He'd been assigned to get information from her as well. And that meant torturing her.

He considered whether he could use the soulmate connection to get the information from her without torture and decided that it was too dangerous. He hadn't had a soulmate before and simply didn't know the extent of the connection. He'd heard that it was closer than ordinary telepathy, that it was impossible to hide your feelings from your soulmate. But could you hide facts, if you tried? He really didn't know, and he couldn't risk losing the information.

So it was the usual way—torture--or nothing.

He frowned, staring at the ceiling with its stippled circles of paint. He'd really rather not torture his soulmate to death. Even if you left aside the possibility that the pain would somehow filter back through the soulmate connection to him, he didn't really want to go that far. Let the girl live in the United States for the rest of her natural life, and he'd retreat to Europe and stay there for the next hundred years. People said that the world was becoming a global village, but he thought it was still large enough for a Nightworlder and a vermin to avoid one another if they tried. Or, if worst came to worse, he could kill her quickly. He didn't want to, but he supposed he could do that, if the Night World council insisted.

But something in him shrunk at torturing the girl until she died.

He stared at the ceiling, trying to decide how to handle the situation. What was the best thing to do? Or, if he couldn't find anything that was good, what was the least bad?


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

The vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory picked up the phone. He stared at it for a minute as if he'd never seen a telephone before, despite the fact that he was considerably older than Alexander Graham Bell. Then, seeming to make up his mind, he punched a long string of numbers into the keypad and waited.

The tinny ringing stopped. "Yes?"

No politeness. No question as to who was calling. They already knew. He never questioned how much they knew.

"I have a request," he said. The words were thick on his tongue, an implicit admission of failure.

"What?"

"I wish permission to turn Farmer's daughter into one of us."

Silence, with nothing but thousands of miles of static to break it.

"You want to change the girl into a vampire?" the voice inquired, exquisitely and painfully polite.

He could tell from the tone what the answer would be, but he pursued his request doggedly. Whatever they would do to him for making the request, they'd certainly do now. Nothing he could say would make it worse.

"Humans may not know about the Night World," he said. "But there is precedent for changing them, once they've found out. Hunter Redfern changed his daughter's suitor, John Quinn, into a vampire. The council took no action against him and permitted Quinn to live." Another 'Hunter,' he thought idly, and wondered whether Farmer had chosen the name as an obscure challenge of some sort.

"And see how well that turned out," the voice said ironically. "If Quinn had been killed long ago, we would be better off now."

"There were unusual circumstances, sir." He decided not to say that the same unusual circumstances might exist in his case as well. "Besides, until Quinn . . . left . . . , he'd served the Night World council honorably and well. And, as I said, no action was ever taken against Hunter Redfern for his decision to change Quinn."

"Hunter Redfern has always been a member of this council. You are not a member. You never have been."

"True, but I have served you faithfully for centuries. And this is . . . the first such request that I have made."

"What is acceptable for council members is not acceptable for council servants," the voice said sharply. "Quinn was an exception. There can only be a few exceptions, or the exceptions become the rule. Our rule is a good one, and it cannot be weakened by too many exceptions. Or it will fail us when we need it most. Besides, as I have already pointed out, Quinn was a tremendous failure that we all regret."

Samuel was silent. He'd asked and been answered. He didn't really have anything else to say. He hadn't expected his request to be granted, though it would have solved most of his problems if it had been.

"And, if I may ask," the voice went on, poisonous-polite and now taking the aggressive, "why are you asking for permission to change the daughter of a notorious slayer into one of us?"

This was the question he'd most hoped not to be asked. He might believe that he was not at fault for having succumbed to the soulmate malady, but he knew better than to think that the Night World council would overlook the connection. On the other hand, he also knew that he was the council's servant. They had a right to his loyalty and honesty, even when it involved something that he would very much rather that they did not know.

"Have you fallen in love with her?" the voice asked.

He grasped hastily at the respite from his dilemma. "No."

"Some other reason, perhaps? Has someone tried to intercede for her life?"

"No. Nothing like that. The bomb was a bad mistake," he went on thoughtfully. "The FBI are still here investigating. Nearly every law enforcement agency in the vicinity has gotten involved in some way. The mysterious death of a girl now, under the circumstances, might attract the attention that the Night World seeks to avoid. If she were turned, however, we could control her actions, force her not to reveal our existence and to obey our rules—."

"Turning her is an overly dramatic solution for so small a problem," the voice disagreed, bored. "Make it look as if she'd set the first bomb and died when she tried to set off a second and it exploded prematurely. Everyone will be happy at such a neat conclusion. If anyone isn't, our representatives in the FBI will be sure to make the investigating agents accept the story."

Since that had been Samuel's exact plan when he'd taken her to the chemistry lab, he had no objection to make.

"It's not like you not to see the obvious," the voice added. "I hope you're not losing your touch."

Assassins who lost their touch were not given a pension and sent off into a happy and peaceful retirement. Unconsciously, Samuel's fingers clenched around the receiver. The plastic creaked, and he hastily loosened his grip.

"The problem will be solved," he promised.

It would be, too. No matter what it cost him. He was a council servant, and he was loyal to its wishes. Even when they were occasionally idiotic, as now. Setting off a second bomb to hide the damage he'd do when torturing the girl to death was possible, yes, but it wasn't certain that the bomb would hide everything, and if other students were killed in the blast, that would simply attract more attention to the incident. He might have an ulterior motive for asking for permission to change the girl, but there were also sound practical reasons for taking that approach.

"See to it, then. It's inappropriate for you to call us over trivia."

He heard a click and then the buzzing dial tone.

Letting out a sigh, he hung up his receiver as well. One option gone. He'd have to choose the least bad from the remaining ones.

Least bad, least bad. Which was the least bad?

"Darling," Anne's mother said, "I know you've been having some bad days at school. But you've hardly ever had detention before. Do you want to talk about it?"

"Um. It's nothing much, really."

"A bomb going off in your English classroom has got to be 'something much.'"

"Um. Yeah."

Anne didn't know what to tell her mother. She was afraid to say that the Night World was involved. She didn't think her mother knew about the Night World. Her mother never talked too much about her father, but they'd obviously dated for a while, even though Anne's father—whatever his true name was—had died before he could marry her mother. Her mother might know something. Or suspect. Anne didn't want the assassin to target her mother, too.

"You seem to have made new friends," Ms. Jamison prodded gently. "Amaranth Klein and, um, Meredith Lyon."

"Mary Lyon."

"Oops, sorry. Mary Lyon."

"They seem like nice girls. I should call their parents sometime and talk with them about how they're dealing with the aftermath of this bomb incident."

Anne thought that was a very bad idea, but she was fairly sure that her mother would become suspicious if Anne asked her not to call. It wasn't as if Anne could give a good reason for her mother to stay away from the Kleins and Lyons.

For the first time, Anne wondered if Amaranth's parents and Mary's parents were also part of Circle Daybreak. Neither Amaranth nor Mary had said they were. But if they weren't, did that mean that they would think that their daughters ought to be killed for violating Night World law?

"Is it all right if Mary comes over for a while this afternoon?" she evaded.

Ms. Jamison looked a bit startled. "That's all right, yes, but maybe she shouldn't spend the night. You've been having a lot of sleepovers lately, and you look as if you haven't gotten enough sleep."

Anne was sure her mother was right about that.

She also wondered if Amaranth's spells were wearing off. That was all right, actually. She didn't like to think of her mother permanently bewitched, or hypnotized, or whatever. But it had been very convenient when her mother hadn't argued about letting Amaranth sleep over, or about letting Anne go to stay the night with Mary.

"All right," she said.

If Amaranth couldn't stay the night, then she'd be alone, without protection. But Amaranth's protection hadn't saved her before. She was going to have to try something new.

Anne had decided that it was time she stopped relying on Circle Daybreak to protect her and that she find a way to protect herself.

Around them, the noise of the high school cafeteria rose to deafening levels. Anne and Amaranth were sitting apart with their heads practically touching one another so as to be able to hear. Even so, they were nearly shouting. Anne thought that if the cafeteria noise had suddenly stopped—which it never did—their voices would probably have been audible at the other end of the school.

"You want to take up sword practice again?" Amaranth asked doubtfully? "But why? I thought you didn't like it. And now that we know Samuel's your soulmate, the best thing probably would be for you to try to communicate with him and to persuade him to join Daybreak. You don't have to worry that he'll attack you any more."

Anne gritted her teeth. Amaranth had been good to her, had warned her about the Night World and had done her best to help Anne survive. But Anne couldn't believe that the vampire who'd looked at her with such absolute and unmitigated disgust would suddenly turn around and start sending her flowers. She didn't trust him. She didn't think she had any reason to trust him, soulmate or no.

"I want to learn to defend myself," she said firmly. "I don't want to feel helpless any more."

"You're not helpless."

"I feel helpless." Anne reconsidered. "No, I was helpless. When I was kidnapped, I was definitely helpless. I want to stop being helpless."

"Well. . . ." Amaranth sounded dubious, but she suddenly straightened and looked excited. "Yes! That's exactly what you ought to do. You and Samuel will be like Rashel and Quinn."

"Hunh?"

"Rashel and Quinn! I told you about them. They fight together for Daybreak. And that's why you ought to learn how to fight. If your soulmate is a fighter, you should be a fighter, too. You'll understand one another better that way, and you can be true partners. I mean, soulmates always understand one another, that's what the soulmate bond is all about, but . . . yeah, it's natural for you to want to learn to fight. Just like Samuel."

"I—" Anne paused to consider. That wasn't what she'd had in mind. On the other hand, having a soulmate was new to her. She wasn't an expert. How did she know?

"I guess," she finally concluded. "It could work that way."

"Great! I'll find Mary after lunch and let her know. She'd probably be glad to work out with you some more after school."

Mary's lunch period was the one after that of Anne and Amaranth. The high school, having more students than it had lunchroom space, held three lunch periods.

"I wanted to ask you something else," Amaranth said.

"What?"

"Um." Amaranth almost looked embarrassed. "I wanted to know if . . . well, if you'd like to join Circle Daybreak. Formally, I mean. I know we never got around to it before, but . . . well, we'd love to have you." Her last words, sounding oddly formal, came out in a rush.

Anne blinked. "Sure."

She hadn't really thought about joining Daybreak before. Well, there had been more important things to worry about. Such as staying alive after she'd been targeted for assassination.

"I'll arrange a ceremony," Amaranth promised. "Just leave it to me. This evening, maybe, after you work out with Mary?"

"My mother said I need to stay home tonight," Anne apologized.

"We'll hold it at Mary's house after you two finish practicing," Amaranth decided. "You can be home in time for dinner. Your mother won't notice anything."

"All right."

Neither Amaranth nor Anne noticed Ivy watching them balefully from the other side of the lunchroom.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

Anne hadn't known what to expect about Amaranth's ceremony making her a member of Circle Daybreak. Part of her had rolled her eyes, remembering some of the silly "ceremonies" the teachers had held for the students. There had been "graduation from kindergarten," for example, which had been sort of fun at the time but which she was embarrassed to remember now.

Part of her, though, had half-expected Amaranth to come up with something truly spectacular and frightening and awe-inspiring. Amaranth was a witch, after all. What sort of ceremony could a witch come up with, if she wanted?

As it turned out, the ceremony wasn't as grand as Anne had half-expected, and wasn't as embarrassing as she'd half-feared.

It started out vaguely silly. She was blindfolded, which she disliked even though she could see a little bit of the floor where the blindfold didn't come down quite far enough. A "mystery person"—who sounded exactly like Amaranth--asked her if she was willing to become part of Circle Daybreak, to defend other Daybreakers against Nightworlders and humans who threatened them, to be loyal to the ideals and goals of Daybreak. Anne dutifully agreed that she'd promise to do all of what a good Daybreaker would do. Then her blindfold was removed, and she could see that there were two other Daybreakers who were there and participating in the ceremony. Mary, of course, and a tall brown-haired boy that Anne knew vaguely as Mary's boyfriend, Neil. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

Amaranth brought out a box of candles, and they each chose a candle and lit it. Then Amaranth told them all the history of Circle Daybreak, how it had formed to prevent peace between the humans and the Night World. How both groups had done terrible things to one another, and both groups had been full of prejudice and misunderstanding. But neither was irretrievably bad, and there were good people among both groups. How Circle Daybreak sought to mediate between humans and Nightworlders, and to create peace, and to stop unnecessary bloodshed and violence.

Anne had never thought of herself as a particularly good person. She believed she muddled through life the way everyone else did. She'd never seen herself as especially beautiful, or especially bright, or unusually talented at much of anything. She made fairly good grades, but she knew she wasn't even going to be close to being the class valedictorian. The most selfless thing she'd probably done with her life was to contribute to some charity drives. She'd never even imagined becoming a heroine, or giving her life for some cause.

But as she listened to Amaranth's hushed words, and watched the tiny flames over the candles, she suddenly wondered if that could change. If she could do something for good. Make a difference. Be a heroine.

She pushed the thought away with all the force of her common sense. She was just Anne Jamison, no one special, even if her mysterious father had been a notorious slayer. She'd never done anything particularly important with her life, and she didn't believe that was going to change. Heroes were, well, people who were a little apart from the rest of humanity.

But for just a minute, she could imagine herself fighting for Circle Daybreak, struggling for a cause she believed in, trying to protect innocent people and to stop the endless conflict between the human world and the Night World. Changing the world for the better, even if it was only a little tiny bit.

But all too soon, Amaranth finished her story about Circle Daybreak. Anne promised again—this time, with more intensity—that she would be loyal to Circle Daybreak and its ideals. Then they snuffed out the candles, and Amaranth broke the circle that she'd drawn, and they all started to laugh and talk.

As she stood, Anne felt a painful twitch in her right leg. It reminded her that her workout session with Mary before the ceremony hadn't gone as well as she'd hoped. She was much more motivated to learn to fight this time. Unfortunately, she didn't think she'd done any better than she had before Samuel had kidnapped her. She'd collected another set of bruises where Mary's practice sword had gotten through her guard, and sitting still for the ceremony had only caused her muscles to stiffen up and ache even more than they had before.

The way she winced and rubbed her thigh didn't escape Mary's attention. "Did I hurt you?"

"No. Or yes, but it's okay." Anne touched her bruised leg gingerly.

"I'm sorry."

"No. It was my fault. I didn't block you properly."

"You're learning, though," Mary said encouragingly. "In a couple of years, if you keep training every day, you'll probably be fairly good."

"But what can I do now?" Anne asked. She heard a plaintive note in her voice and tried to suppress it. "If I meet Samuel again—or if the Night World sends some other assassin—what can I do to defend myself? I don't think the Night World will wait a couple of years before they try again to kill me."

She was rather proud of the way that her voice didn't wobble when she said "try again to kill me." She was getting tougher, she thought. Maybe she still couldn't handle a sword very well, but she was becoming mentally stronger. That counted.

"Maybe you need a gun," Neil suggested.

Mary opened her mouth, but Neil was going on.

"I'm Neil Dessay. I think you were in my geometry class last year. You sat up front in the second row, and I was in the back in the fourth row."

Anne hesitated.

Neil seemed to understand. "You probably don't remember. I saw the back of your head every day, but you probably didn't see me at all."

"I saw you," Anne said. "Just not often."

"Yeah, that's why I like sitting in the back of the room," he told her amiably. "You don't see the blackboard as well, but you see all the people. It's the other way around when you sit in front. You see the blackboard, but you can't see who's paying attention to the teacher and who isn't. You learn a lot about people when you sit in the back."

"Neil's going to be a sociology major in college," Mary said, a little wryly.

"Well, that or a psychology major. I haven't decided yet." Neil didn't seem embarrassed. "By the way, I'm human. Like you."

"Two Nightworlders, two humans," Amaranth said, sounding pleased, as she returned from putting the box of candles away. "We're balanced now."

"I thought there would be more of you. I mean, more Daybreakers," Anne said cautiously. "Four people doesn't sound like a lot."

"Well, we have sympathizers in Circle Twilight, even though they don't want to break with Twilight yet and come over to us. And there are lots more Daybreakers around the world. But there are only the four of us here, in our school."

"Oh." Anne digested this. She'd somehow expected that she'd be part of a larger group. Knowing that there were only three other people who were part of her particular Daybreak circle somehow made her feel more isolated, in greater danger.

Well, she told herself, you'll just have to find a way to deal with the danger. Because no one else is going to do it for you.

"Maybe a gun would be a good idea," she said aloud. "But I don't know how to get one. They don't sell guns to minors, do they?"

"No," Mary said.

"But I could probably get you one, if you wanted," Neil said.

"Neil!" Mary didn't look happy.

"She needs something to defend herself," Neil argued. "She'd be a lot better able to defend herself now with a gun than with a sword."

"But a gun's illegal."

"So? We're already breaking Night World law just by existing," Neil reasoned. "I don't see anything wrong with defending ourselves. I've never heard anyone say that defending yourself against an assassin is wrong."

"But she ought to do it with a sword. Or some weapon that isn't illegal." Mary sounded very definite.

"You said yourself that she wouldn't be good with a sword for another two years. What's she supposed to do, hide for two years until she's good enough to defend herself? What if the assassin finds her in the meantime?"

"She can't hide for two years!" Amaranth looked horrified. "She and Samuel are soulmates. He's not going to hurt her. But if she hides from him, then they won't be able to form the soulmate bond. He'll go on being an assassin, and there'll be no one to stop him."

Neil was shaking his head, but Anne intervened before he could speak.

"I really think I need some way to defend myself right now. Maybe it doesn't have to be a gun. But I need something more than just a sword that I can't really use yet. Mary, you know how many times you could have got through my guard today and killed me, if you'd wanted to."

Mary looked unhappy. But, after a pause, she insisted, "We ought to obey the law as much as we can. All the laws."

"I'd rather break the law and use a gun to defend myself than be dead."

"Besides," Neil added, "this isn't the sort of situation that humans had in mind when they created gun control laws. They were thinking about teenage gangs, and drug dealing and . . . well, stuff like that. They weren't thinking about a girl needing to defend herself from a Night World assassin. If the legislators had known about the Night World, they'd probably have passed a different law."

Mary still didn't look convinced. But Anne was beginning to feel more certain in her own mind about what she wanted.

"Can you get me a gun, Neil? Just something I can use to defend myself, if I need to."

"You can't shoot Samuel!" Amaranth jumped in. "You just can't! Believe me, if you do you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Maybe the rest of all your reincarnated lives."

"I'd like to save my life this time around," Anne retorted. Then she relented. "But if he won't try to kill me, I won't try to kill him."

Amaranth eyed her. "Promise?"

"I promise."

"They could send another assassin after her, you know," Neil murmured. "If they find out that she and this vampire are soulmates, then they probably won't trust him to kill her, and they'll send someone else."

"I really need that gun," Anne said.

Amaranth hesitated and then nodded, reluctantly. "But I'll put some defensive spells on you, too. They'll help prevent you from needing to use the gun."

It was Anne's turn to consider. She decided that there wasn't any harm in having protection by Amaranth's spells, in addition to the protection that a gun would give her. What could be wrong with having double protection? "Okay."

Ivy Greer sauntered into the shop.

She had chosen to wear her new black leather duster that afternoon. She left it open in front so that it parted as she walked to display her red leather miniskirt. Her knee-high black calfskin boots, she believed, completed the picture.

She stalked with disdainful grace past the dusty display cases and up to the counter. The middle-aged and overweight man sitting there looked at her with less admiration than she thought appropriate, and she let some of her answering dislike drip into her voice.

"I want to buy a gun."

"Sorry." He didn't sound sorry at all. "It's illegal to sell guns to minors."

No vermin was a match for her.

She put her (imported) leather purse on the counter, took out her wallet, and showed him the I.D. she'd made on her computer at home. It was a horrible imitation of a real driver's license, but as his eyes took a perfunctory glance at it, she reached out with her own mind and pushed.

"I'm sorry," the man said, sounding genuinely apologetic. "My mistake."

She smiled at him with her best regal expression. Back when she'd been eleven, she'd practiced it every day in front of the mirror. She'd wanted to get just the right look, something that combined power and strength and contempt.

The Night World, after all, was a cruel place. If you weren't capable of defending yourself, you probably wouldn't survive. Ivy intended to survive.

The man showed her several guns that he had available for sale. Ivy chose a small one that she thought she could carry conveniently in her purse. It was a little heavier than she would have liked, but she supposed that guns weren't exactly like iPods or Palm Pilots. They didn't get smaller and better every year.

When it came time to fill out the mandatory paperwork and pay for the gun, Ivy pushed with her mind again. The shop owner promptly forgot that he'd ever had the gun, much less that it was necessary for Ivy to pay for it.

No vermin was a match for any Nightworlder, Ivy thought smugly, as she walked out of the gun shop with her black trench coat billowing around her and a new weight in her purse. It was true that humans bred faster than Nightworlders. But then, so did cockroaches.

It was a pity that Circle Daybreak couldn't admit the obvious. Whoever had most power, won. Only the fittest survived. It might not be fair, or right, or the way anyone wanted the world to be. But it was the way things were. And Ivy Greer was a realist.

She knew where she could get wooden bullets, as well as regular ones. She planned to provide herself with a good supply of both.

You never knew whom you might have to kill—vermin, Daybreakers, or Night World assassins.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

"I need to speak with you," Anne told Amaranth, as soon as homeroom ended and they had a few minutes between classes.

"Now?" Amaranth shoved her English notebook in her locker and looked at Anne in surprise.

"At lunch. But I've absolutely got to talk to you then. It's important."

Amaranth blinked. "All right."

Anne was a few seconds late to her next class. It might have made her feel guilty last week. It didn't bother her at all that day. She stared at her notebook or out the window while the teacher talked to them about the very odd Battle of New Orleans. She was worried, and frightened, and nervous with anticipation, all at the same time.

When lunch finally came, she could barely control her impatience long enough to stand in the food line. She took the first selections offered and hurried to the spot in the corner where she and Amaranth had eaten before. It was about as private a place as you could get in a school lunchroom, which wasn't saying much.

Amaranth was already there, poking with some uncertainty at what the school alleged was vegetable lasagna. "What's up?"

"I got an email late last night," Anne said tersely, sitting down. "From him." She emphasized the last word meaningfully.

Amaranth blinked. "From Samuel?"

"Yes, him. Whatever his real name is."

Amaranth pushed her plate to one side and leaned forward, excited. "This is great! I knew he'd contact you. What did he say?"

"He wants to have a private meeting with me," Anne said grimly.

"Great! When, where?"

"Tonight. And here, actually."

"Here?"

"School," Anne elaborated. "The chemistry classroom where he kidnapped me before, actually." She frowned. "I wonder if he's got a set of keys to the school, or something like that? Because this is the second time he seems to think that he can get into the school at night, without any problems at all."

"He's a Night World assassin and a vampire. They probably, I don't know, trained him in assassin school to be able to get into whatever building he wants."

Anne had a brief ludicrous image of kindergarteners in ninja costumes sitting with their chubby, tiny hands folded at their desks while a teacher drew lock-picking diagrams on the blackboard. Well, that was certainly unreal, but for all she knew there was a Night World Assassins' Academy somewhere.

"Anyway," she said, bringing herself firmly back to the lunchroom and her conversation with Amaranth, "what do you think I should do? Neil hasn't gotten me a gun yet. We don't even know for sure if he'll be able to."

"You don't need a gun to meet your soulmate!" Amaranth sounded horrified.

"You keep saying that, but he tried to kill me last time."

"That was before he knew you were his soulmate."

"Well, he didn't seem terribly impressed with me," Anne muttered.

"Doesn't matter. You're still his soulmate. He's had time to realize that," Amaranth sounded very certain. "There's only one way that this can go now. He'll talk to you a little, he'll fall in love, you'll fall in love with him, and he'll leave Circle Midnight and join Circle Daybreak so that the two of you can be together forever."

Anne blew out her breath in a frustrated puff.

"I hope you're right," she finally said, choosing her words carefully. "I really do. Please don't think that I don't hope that everything goes exactly the way you said."

Amaranth sighed in turn. "But you just aren't sure it will."

Anne nodded. "I mean, he tried to kill me last time. That was—" she hesitated, at a loss for words, before finally settling on "—scary."

It had been much worse than "scary," but she didn't want to say that. She wanted to be a strong member of Circle Daybreak, and not weak or incompetent.

Amaranth was clearly thinking hard. "I could give you a spell of protection. I don't have a lot of time if your meeting's tonight, and I need time to make a strong spell that will last a long time. But I can still make a strong spell if it doesn't have to last very long. If you know when you're going to meet with Samuel. . . ."

"At ten o'clock exactly."

"I could give you a protection spell that would start around 9:30 and last until midnight," Amaranth offered, after thinking a little. "And we could all come with you and stay outside, but close enough that we could hear you if you shout."

It was Anne's turn now to think hard. "I don't know if it would be a good idea for all of you to come. He said that I had to come alone. He might not show up if he knew the rest of you were out there."

It also occurred to her that it might be dangerous for her friends to wait for her. What if Samuel Gregory followed them home, learned who they were? If he told the Night World council that he'd found and identified a group of Daybreakers, would the council order their deaths? Or—worse yet--was Samuel Gregory under standing orders to kill any Daybreakers he found?

She didn't know if Amaranth was thinking the same thing, but the other girl was nodding, if a bit reluctantly.

"You're right," she said. "He asked for a private meeting between the two of you, and you can't lie to your soulmate. You have to give him a private meeting, or else not go at all." She brightened. "But I can still help you get permission from your mother to be out late."

Anne winced at the thought of having Amaranth put yet another spell on her mother. But she didn't see what other choice she had, not really. Her mother would almost certainly ask a lot of questions if Anne said that she had to go somewhere that late in the evening.

"All right."

That evening, while her mother looked faintly dazed and agreed with Amaranth that Anne could and should stay out as long as she wanted that night, Anne clung firmly to the thought that she had no choice. She had to meet with the assassin, and she had to allow Amaranth to bespell her mother in order to have her meeting. It might not be a good thing, but it was less bad than refusing to meet with Samuel Gregory. She had no idea what would happen if she refused to talk with her soulmate, but she was afraid that it wouldn't be good.

When she arrived at the school, she wasn't sure at first how she would get in. But one of the front doors was unlocked, and a few lights had been left on. She walked slowly through the dim corridors to the science wing. She'd never been in the school before when it was empty, and the halls somehow seemed both bigger and uglier. She wished she could turn around and leave, but she knew she couldn't.

The door to her chemistry classroom was closed but unlocked. She pushed it open slowly and stepped inside.

She'd imagined that Samuel Gregory would either have turned all the lights on, or that he'd have met her there in pitch darkness. Neither was true. A single overhead light was on, just as had been true in all the other classrooms she'd passed. From outside, she realized, this room would look no different than any other. As long as neither of them stepped close enough to the windows to be seen, no one would know they were there. And the windows were small and high, so that it wasn't easy for the students to look out, or anyone to break in.

He was sitting at the teacher's desk, riffling through what she recognized with a shock as Mr. Farris's grade book. He didn't look up as she entered. She stood there, uncertain for a second of what to do.

"Did you know that you're only doing a little above average in this class?" he asked her, still looking at the grade book. She could hear the accent in his voice again, faint but distinct.

"I have a B-plus." This wasn't the conversation she'd expected.

"Yes, exactly. Most of the students are making either a B or a B-plus. A few Cs, one D. A bunch of As. You may think you're making good grades, but in fact you're only average." He shut the book and slipped it back in the drawer before looking at her and smiling.

"You said I was a little above average before," was all Anne could think to say.

"Well. A very little." He held his fingers up to pinch a tiny bit of air.

He was still smiling. It was a condescending smile, that of an adult to a child, and it made Anne angry. Maybe he was older than she was, but he didn't have any right to condescend to her.

"How old are you?" she asked abruptly.

He tilted his head, smile fading. "Does it matter?"

"It does to me."

"And I am here to answer your questions, of course." He said it as if it weren't true at all, as if it were rather funny that she might have even imagined that he might answer.

"You might as well tell me," Anne said. She could feel her own anger growing, and she struggled to try to keep it back. She was here in the hope that he'd agree to abandon his project of trying to kill her. There wasn't any point in antagonizing him.

Even if he behaved as if he knew everything, and she knew nothing; as if he had all the power and time in the world, and she had none of either.

"Over six hundred," he said, pushing the chair back slightly from the desk and starting to swivel it back and forth.

Anne did some rapid math in her head. "You're practically medieval," was the first thing that came to her mind.

"No. I'm a Night World assassin." He wasn't smiling any more. "Not a human. Human time doesn't matter to me."

"But you were a human once. You're a made vampire."

There was a pause, and then the chair began to swivel again. "I am," he said, lightly.

"You remember being human."

"I have an excellent memory." The chair continued to swivel, back and forth.

"Why do you kill humans? You used to be one," Anne challenged. "Do you think it's right?"

"You're vermin."

"You used to be vermin, too."

"But I'm not now," he pointed out reasonably.

His foot suddenly stopped the swing of the chair and he looked at her, motionless.

"You don't have to be human any more, either. In fact, it would be an excellent solution to our current problem."

"What problem?" she asked. But her heart was beginning to pound, and she had a bad feeling that she wouldn't like where the conversation was going.

"I have to kill you," he said. He sounded quite calm, as if this were no more important to him than the chemistry grades he'd been looking at before.

"Why don't you just stop? Stop trying to kill me, I mean."

"And then what do you think would happen?"

"You'd just . . . go home. Back where you came from. Wherever. I'd go on with school. Nothing would happen."

Her heart was pounding even harder. What would he say to that?

According to Amaranth, Anne's soulmate would have stood up, declared he had no intention of leaving his beloved soulmate, and taken her in his arms. After which, they'd have flown to the arms of Circle Daybreak together. Anne didn't really expect such a happy, painless ending. But she still felt sick at the answer she got.

"No, that's not would happen. What would happen is that the Night World council would punish me, maybe kill me, for having refused to kill you. And it wouldn't do you any good, either because the council would send another assassin after you. And you'd be dead."

"Maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I can take of myself," Anne said, struggling to sound defiant and strong.

He just shook his head, his expression going remote. "You don't know how easy it is to kill a person."

"I know enough."

"No, you don't, or you wouldn't say you can defend yourself." He met her eyes, and she was surprised to see how serious he'd become.

"Assassins don't kill because they're supermen with super-skills. That's for television shows, books, movies. Assassins kill because their targets don't know that they're there. You can't protect yourself from a lethal blow when you don't know that someone's planning to deliver it. It takes one bullet—just one—with a rifle with a laser target. One bomb—"

"Someone already tried to kill me with a bomb. And I'm still here."

He made an impatient sound with his tongue. "Yes, bombs can go off at the wrong time, and you weren't in the classroom when it went off, so you survived. And maybe you would have survived even if you had been there, because you might not have been sitting close enough to the bomb to be caught directly in the blast. But you're missing the point here. If someone really wants you dead, and that person's reasonably competent, that person can buy or make a weapon to kill you before you even know what's happening. That's how your father managed to kill Nightworlders, after all."

"It was?" Anne said, before she could stop herself.

"Oh, yes. Did you think he was eight feet tall and a samurai who'd trained for years in some mystical dojo? No, he had a gun and knew how to shoot well. He shot Nightworlders before they could defend themselves with their powers. If half your head is blown off, it doesn't matter what powers you have. You're dead. Or at least, you're so close to dead that your killer can come up to you and finish you off easily with wood or silver or whatever you're vulnerable to." He looked her directly in the eye. "I never met your father, but he was infamous in the Night World. He usually shot Nightworlders in the back, because that was more efficient and safer than challenging them and letting them gather their powers to defend themselves."

Anne felt sick. She'd never known her father had killed Nightworlders until recently, but when Amaranth had told her, she'd imagined her father as . . . as a male version of Buffy. Amaranth had even called him a slayer, just like Buffy. She'd thought of him as doing backflips with a stake and effortlessly turning snarling, soulless vampires to dust. Or as fighting the way Mary did, with a wooden sword.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

But Samuel was shaking his head impatiently. "I'm not criticizing him. I'm pointing out how assassins work. All assassins. He didn't do anything I haven't done. Every assassin I know kills by shooting the target in the back, or by doing things that are equally unfair. Shooting people in the back is efficient and gets the job done. And we're professionals. We're not doing this for TV ratings. Our job is to kill people, not to look pretty while we're doing it."

He paused.

"So don't think you can defend yourself. You can't. I couldn't, if an assassin targeted me. Powers are good, vampire speed is good, witch spells are good, changing shapes is good—but none of it matters, absolutely none, against a bullet in the head. Or any of half a dozen other tools that assassins use," he finished, bleakly.

"So what do I do?" Anne said, after it became clear that he wasn't going to lecture her any more about assassins and how they worked. "Do I just give up and die?" She was surprised to hear how bitter her voice sounded.

He took a deep breath, and she was startled to see how fast he pushed away the dark mood that seemed to have come over him. Suddenly, he was alert and focused again. She could almost see that strange detachment return, see him look at her as if he were the adult and she were the child and he'd always find her clumsy and naive and amusing.

"I have a proposition for you," he said, lightly. "Perhaps it might save your life."

"What is it?"

"Leave."

"What?"

"Leave. Go to a Daybreak safehouse," he elaborated, as she stared at him. "In another city, it doesn't matter where—just far away from here. Let Circle Daybreak protect you. Change your name—the witches should be able to help with that. Make the Night World council lose track of you. After a while, they may even forget about you. But whether they do or don't, you'll be safe. You might even find a vampire or shifter to change you," he added, as an afterthought. "The council would be looking for a human, and they might overlook you if you were just another newly made vampire or shifter with a name they didn't recognize."

Anne shook her head.

"I can't do that."

"It's your only chance. You don't have much of a choice."

"I can stay here and fight."

"You can only stay here and die. I'll kill you."

Anne swallowed. "You're my soulmate. How can you say that? That you'll kill me? Without even blinking, or sounding as if it matters to you? Don't you care that we're soulmates at all? Even a little?"

He looked away from her for an instant—but not, Anne thought, as if he were ashamed of himself. It was more as if he were trying to find the words to explain something that he thought should have been too obvious to need explanation.

"I'm an assassin," he finally said. Carefully, choosing his words. "I kill people because the Night World council sends me to do so. It sends me to kill people in order to protect the Night World and to uphold its laws. Whoever I kill . . . suffers in dying. Their friends and families suffer and grieve when they're gone. I've always known that's what I do. But it's worth it, because sometimes killing people is necessary to uphold Night World society and its laws. Sometimes nothing else works."

He took a breath and went on, as carefully as before. "As for killing you—yes, it will hurt you, and it will hurt your family and friends, and it may even hurt me. If what people say about soulmates is true, then I'll suffer because of your death. But it doesn't matter whether you and I and everyone around you suffers. What matters is that the law will have been upheld, and that the Night World will be safe. That's what I swore to protect, centuries ago. And I've never broken my oath. It's the closest thing I have to a sacred trust."

He looked straight at her, and she could feel that he was completely certain of what he was saying. It was the truth as he saw it.

"You'll kill me," she said again, partly to be sure, and partly because she didn't know what else to say.

"Yes."

"Even though I'm your soulmate."

"Yes."

"Even though you'll be hurt, too."

"Yes."

He sat there, looking calmly at her through his dark eyes, and she didn't know what to say to reach him. To convince him that this was crazy.

"You could leave Circle Midnight and join Circle Daybreak with me," she suggested. Maybe that possibility hadn't occurred to him yet.

He shook his head. "I've taken an oath to the Night World council, which is controlled now by Circle Midnight. I won't break it."

Anne shut her eyes. "Why did you ever take such a stupid oath in the first place?"

It was a rhetorical question, and she didn't expect him to answer. But from the darkness behind her closed eyelids, she heard his voice, remote and emotionless, but with a hint of tiredness.

"When I became an assassin, I wanted to make the Night World a better place."

She opened her eyes.

"It was worse then than it is now," he went on. "Although you might not believe that. But there was a great deal of killing for no particular reason. Nightworlders didn't feel that they needed a reason to kill vermin. If you were hungry, you killed; it was as simple as that. There were always more peasants, and there was actually never quite enough food to feed them. Unless there was a famine, or a plague, and then enough of them died that you had to be careful to allow them to breed and replenish their ranks. And vermin killed us too, whenever they found us. They didn't think they needed reasons to kill, either. Or they had reasons that were obvious to them." He shrugged.

"In any case, Nightworlders and vermin killed one another all the time. For food, for sport, for revenge. There was no end to it. And then the Night World council imposed some laws. There would be perfect secrecy. There would not be any changing of vermin into Nightworlders, because the new Nightworlders might have remaining loyalties to the human world. There would be no love affairs between Nightworlders and vermin, because Nightworlders always want to change the human when they fall in love." He smiled, but not pleasantly. "It's always a one-way street, you know. The humans never change the Nightworlders into humans. If you think about it, that's proof that we're higher on the evolutionary chain than you are."

"It is not," Anne said instantly. "We're not higher or lower. We're just different. Not better or worse, but different."

"Modern twenty-first century democratic politically correct propaganda," he dismissed her words. "Six hundred years ago, we knew better."

"Six hundred years ago you didn't know about evolution at all."

"You'd be surprised what vampires who live for millennia know."

Anne looked away. Took a deep breath. There was no point in debating with him. He was obviously wrong, but he always had an answer.

"And so that's why you agreed to take their stupid oath and become—a tool for the Night World council to use to kill people?"

"I uphold the law."

"But these are bad laws."

"Better a bad law than no law at all. And, as I told you, things have gotten better. I believe that what I've done has helped make the Night World a better place."

Anne couldn't believe what he was saying was true. "What's your name?" she asked abruptly.

"I'm calling myself Samuel Gregory, at the moment."

"From Kafka."

He smiled and nodded.

"But what's your real name?"

He looked distant and amused. "You don't need to know it."

"So I don't need to know your name, and we're not going to . . . get together in any way. You're going to stay with Circle Midnight because of your precious oath, and I need to run away and hide for the rest of my life in a Circle Daybreak safehouse. Because if I don't, you'll kill me."

"Slowly and painfully," he agreed.

She snorted. "You wish."

He looked at her with those dark eyes that seemed to see what she did not, and suddenly she wasn't entirely sure he was just trying to frighten her.

"So is that it? You asked me to come here just to warn me that I needed to leave town or you'd kill me?"

He nodded.

"I don't believe you," she said. "We're soulmates."

"And that's a magic word to conjure by?"

"You're not killing me now," she pointed out. "Even though you keep saying that you won't break your oath to the Night World council, and it told you to kill me."

He frowned, obviously irritated. "The council allows me to judge the best time to strike."

"Does it also allow you to tell your prey that she should run to a Daybreak safehouse?"

Watching him, she saw the frown lines in his forehead melt away. Smooth, impassive, he looked at her as if he hadn't quite focused on her before that second.

"Do you want me to kill you now?"

She wasn't sure if it was a rhetorical question. She decided to play it safe. "No."

He rose. "Then I suggest you not bait me. And this conversation is over."

Over, and she wasn't in any better situation than before.

"You can't just—"

"I can." He turned away, obviously preparing to leave.

Anne darted forward and caught his wrist.

Amaranth had suggested that she try another skin-to-skin contact, if nothing else worked to persuade Samuel Gregory to leave Circle Daybreak and join Circle Daybreak. Anne had thought at the time that she wouldn't be desperate enough to grab a guy who'd tried to kill her once already. But she had changed her mind. Nothing had gone the way she'd expected it to that evening, and she was desperate enough after all to try to reanimate their soulmate connection.

For an instant, she only felt his skin, cool against her own. Then it seemed that sparks flashed between them, and she felt his presence all around her. Their minds seemed to touch, and all boundaries between them dissolved.

-Please,- she thought. –Don't kill me. Don't kill anyone. Just stop.-

He was angry in his head. The calm she'd seen on his face was gone, or had always been a pretense. -How often do I need to tell you what you ought to be able to see for yourself? I've been sent to kill you. You broke Night World law. I will kill you, unless you get out and aren't here any longer for me to kill!-

-We can all live in peace together! Humans and Nightworlders alike! It doesn't have to be this way!- She tried to send him some of the sense of optimism, of hope and faith, that she'd felt during the ceremony when she'd joined Circle Daybreak.

Cold denial, and impatience. –Yes, it does have to be this way.-

-No!-

-If you're young and naive enough to think that people can live in peace together now, when they never have in all of recorded and unrecorded history, that's no problem of mine.-

-I'm not young and I'm not naive!- All her frustration with the way he'd been treating her came out in a silent mental shout.

-Yes, you are,- he replied coldly.

And she saw then, with her mind touching his, that he really saw her that way. She saw the centuries stretch out in his mind, the wrinkled aged faces of people whose grandparents he'd seen born. She saw humans in satin knee breeches and embroidered coats saying, with sublime confidence, that they'd change the world to make it a place where no war would exist. She saw that he regarded her only as the latest naive fool who'd come up with the idea.

-I've lived six hundred years,- he told her brutally, and she realized that he'd followed what she was seeing in his mind. –All your Daybreaker ideas? All your hopes, fears, dreams, plans? I've heard them before. Before your country was even founded. Before your continent was even discovered! And you may be my soulmate, but you're also only seventeen years old!-

In his mind she felt, rather than heard, how young he thought seventeen was.

-And if I lived to be a hundred, you'd still think I was a child?- she asked bitterly.

-If you lived to be a hundred, I would still be six centuries older than you. The distance between us can never change.-

She wanted to cry, and scream, and hit him. She didn't know if that just proved his point that she was a child, or whether anyone would have felt the same way in her position.

With the barriers between them down, she could feel what he felt as well. It was cold disgust—perhaps not so much for her as for the situation, but disgust all the same. He'd been saddled with a soulmate that he didn't want. He didn't want any soulmate at all, but if he had to have one, he would have preferred another vampire, someone who was as old as himself, who had gone through similar experiences. Not a seventeen-year-old human.

He was seeing into her soul, but he didn't want the person he saw there. She was, truly, just a child to him. Someone who wasn't his equal and never could be, in his opinion. And maybe his dislike had other grounds besides her age. She wasn't sure; she only knew he didn't like her.

Then he pulled his wrist sharply away. The connection between them snapped.

Anne stared at him. She knew she ought to move, to say something, but she could find no words. Her emotions still vibrated with the shock and horror of finding that Samuel Gregory had looked into her soul and not liked what he saw there. He knew her, more deeply than anyone ever had and anyone ever would. And he disliked her.

"Don't do that again," her soulmate said. "Don't even think of doing that again."

And then, in a swirl and blur of vampiric speed, he was gone.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

"I've got some bad news for you," Amaranth told Anne grimly.

"Ditto."

As usual, they were half-shouting at each other to be heard over the noise of everyone else's half-shouted conversation in the cafeteria.

"When I found out that your assassin was calling himself Samuel Gregory, I emailed Daybreak headquarters and asked them to give me any information they had on him. Because he might have used the same alias before, just the way that your father always used the same alias when he hunted vampires and Rashel always used to call herself the Cat."

"What did they say?" Anne was feeling a sinking feeling in her stomach.

"Apparently, there are some Daybreakers in Rome who think that he just killed one of their members there last week." Amaranth looked very grim now, but she met Anne's eyes directly. "Someone meeting his description was seen following one of the witches who was trying to reach out to the humans and find allies there. And then the witch disappeared."

"Maybe she just decided to leave?" Anne suggested, although the sinking feeling in her stomach told her otherwise.

"No." Amaranth took a deep breath. "The Daybreak witches in Rome did a spell, a locator spell of sight. You can scry things in a mirror, or a dark liquid, or . . . a crystal ball, even, like in the movies. And the whole coven got together and did the spell. They said there was some sort of barrier up, but they were able to get through it. And they found . . . what was left of her."

"What was left of her?" Anne echoed. But she suddenly knew she didn't want to have Amaranth explain.

Too late.

"She'd been . . . tortured. Then killed. And the witches said they were sure Samuel Gregory did it. They could see him with her in the spell. . . . And when they tried to see where he was now, they could see him when he kidnapped you. Same guy, no question." She swallowed. "I'm sorry, Anne."

Anne felt as if she were a thousand miles away from Amaranth. From everyone. But she heard her voice saying, cool and distant and almost as detached as that of Samuel, "Sorry for what? You didn't do anything."

"I'm just sorry I had to tell you. About your soulmate. I know it must hurt."

"I'm not hurt."

Amaranth looked at her and then slowly shook her head. "You must be hurt; you've got to be. That's the way the soulmate principle works. You're part of one another, and you've got to be hurt by what your soulmate did. I'm just sorry I had to be the one to tell you."

"We may be soulmates, but we're not exactly close." Anne could hear that the detachment was still in her voice. "He told me that he didn't want anything to do with me last night."

Amaranth gaped. "What?"

"He told me that he didn't want anything to do with me."

"But—but—."

"I know that's not how soulmates are supposed to behave," Anne said wearily. "But it's how he behaved. He doesn't want anything to do with me. He's still planning to kill me. If I stay. He wants me to leave. To run away and find some Daybreak safehouse where they can protect me."

Now that she had said it, she didn't feel detached and remote any more. She just felt tired. And miserable.

"Maybe you ought to go," Amaranth said.

"You think so? I thought you were telling me how I ought to stay and convince Samuel that he should join Circle Daybreak."

"Yes, but that was before I got the email from Rome."

"Big deal." Anne had suddenly crossed some line between tiredness and anger. "You knew he was an assassin. You knew he was trying to kill me. So now we find out that he killed someone else. You didn't think I was his first target, did you?"

"I knew he'd killed other people before, but—"

"I want to stay and fight. I don't want to run away. My home is here. My mother is here. My life is here. Why should I go run away and hide with Circle Daybreak for the rest of my life? What would my mother think if she could never see me again? Or is she supposed to come and hide in the safehouse with me forever?"

"Daybreak headquarters said that they might be able to send someone to help, but they've got other things going on right now. They're still preparing for the millennium battle, and, well, stuff like that."

"I don't want to be rescued by Rashel and Quinn or Keller and Galen or whoever. I want to be able to take care of myself."

"So that's it. I'm staying." Anne could hear her voice rise, but she didn't care any more. "I'm going to fight back. I am not going to let this stupid guy ruin my entire life. I am not going to let the Night World ruin my life."

"Sh," Amaranth said, looking around nervously.

Anne sat back in her chair, grabbed her fork, and took a bite of whatever mystery meat the cafeteria had served her. It was cold and tasteless, but she forced it down anyway.

"Anne, it's not just how you feel." Amaranth was looking more nervous and unhappy than ever. "It's . . . the Rome witches were able to tell where Samuel Gregory had hidden Lia DiSilvo's body. She was the witch he killed."

"So?" Anne took another defiant bite.

"So they went to get the body to bury her properly. It was at an old Night World site, and probably lots of assassins for the council had used it before. Now that Daybreak has found it, the council probably won't be able to use it again. So that's good."

"Great." Anne stabbed with her fork at another piece of mystery meat.

"But the thing is . . . they took pictures of the way Lia looked when they found her. And they attached the pictures in their email to me." She fumbled at her backpack and brought out an envelope.

Anne put her fork down. "I don't want to see."

"They're awful, but you ought to see them. You need to see them," Amaranth insisted, when Anne made no move to take the envelope. "This is why you ought to think about going to a Circle Daybreak safehouse. If this is what Samuel Gregory did to another Daybreaker, this is what he might do to you."

My soulmate, Anne thought. Someone who's a perfect match for me. Or who was, once upon a time. Six hundred years ago, before he took an oath and became an assassin.

"You have to know the truth," Amaranth persisted. She was still holding the envelope out.

Moving slowly, Anne took the envelope from Amaranth. Opened it. Shook the photographs onto the table. Looked.

"I'm sorry," Amaranth whispered, wretchedly.

Anne told herself she was not going to vomit. She told herself the same thing again. Then she rose and fled for the girls' bathroom.

"You know, I really should be walking you home," Neil said to Mary.

They'd gone out to a movie that evening. When it got out, they'd headed toward Neil's house.

"Your place is on my way home," Mary reminded him. "My house would be out of your way."

"Yeah, but I still should be walking you home. This way, it's like you walking me home."

"Does it matter?"

Neil shrugged. "Well, the other guys would think I'm a wuss to let my girlfriend walk me home all the time."

"It's not all the time," Mary said patiently. "It's just tonight. And what do you care what the other guys say? You know I can take care of myself." She decided not to point out that as a shifter with training in fighting, she could probably take better care of herself in a fight than Neil could.

"I know. And hey, it's cool. Except I wish I could tell the other guys that you're a shifter. Maybe then they would leave me alone in the locker room."

"Are they bothering you in the locker room?"

"Hey, it's not only girls that pick on one another, you know."

Mary thought about it as they walked. She wasn't sure what to do.

"Maybe Amaranth could cast a spell?" she suggested.

"I can take care of myself."

"Are you sure?" The new voice was cool, and detached, and something in Mary recognized it as very frightening. She spun to face the voice's owner and, at the same time, felt her body hover on the verge of shifting to something with claws and large, sharp teeth.

The white teeth she saw glistening in the street lamps were long and sharp in their own right. A vampire, she knew right away. Pale, dark-haired. Young-looking, which meant nothing more than that he was probably a made vampire.

Neil was still turning to face the newcomer. Part of her recognized that Neil was human-slow and that the vampire could have easily killed him, if he'd intended to. Another part of her was wondering uneasily whether the vampire could have killed her as well. She hadn't known he was there, hadn't smelled his presence. Of course, if he'd known she was a shifter, he might have approached from downwind.

"You're Samuel Gregory," she accused.

"Of course." He half-bowed, and in the movement she almost caught a glimpse of another time, a set of customs that had vanished before she was born. Vanished wholly, except in a few novels, a few paintings, and the long memories of Night World vampires.

"What do you want with us?" Neil asked. Coiled and alert as Mary was, she could hear his quickened breathing and smell his fear-excitement scent.

She wanted to reach out to hold him back, to warn him that he was no match for a Night World assassin--perhaps both of them together weren't a match for Samuel Gregory--but she was afraid he wouldn't understand. She held still, coiled upon herself like a spring, feeling her wild nature boil up inside her, waiting.

"I want to talk with you. Nothing more." He glanced at Mary. "My word upon it."

Mary let herself relax very slightly. Night World assassins were the stuff of nightmares, but they took their oaths very seriously.

It hadn't escaped her attention, though, that he'd turned to her when giving his word. He'd known she was a shifter, and he hadn't wanted to give his word to a mere human, someone who was, in his eyes, vermin. But if he knew that she was a shifter and Neil was human, did he also know that they were Daybreakers? People who were under an automatic Night World death sentence?

Studying his eyes, she thought he did. She wasn't quite sure, though.

"So talk," she said briefly.

"You know a girl named Anne Jamison."

"Yes." That was safe to admit; she and Neil and Anne went to the same school, after all.

"She needs to leave this town. Quickly, quietly, and as soon as possible. Or, in the alternative, she needs to--" he paused, clearly searching his mind for an appropriate phrase, "—change her nature."

"What are you talking about?" Neil exploded.

Samuel Gregory didn't move his eyes from Mary. "She's been targeted because of her family. Not because of anything she's done, or hasn't done. I don't know—for certain—what friends she has made. Until I am sure of the situation, I don't need to move to remedy it. If Anne Jamison has any friends who care for her, they will rescue her before I become sure of the situation and need to resolve it. Which will be very soon, I'm afraid."

"And you're asking us—" Mary realized she should have said "me," but it was already too late, "—to get her out of town. Or to change her nature."

The dark head dipped in a nod. "She might survive better if she were in the care of . . . certain persons. Persons who have secret places where people like me are unwelcome."

A Daybreak safehouse, Mary thought. She'd heard of them. It wasn't a bad solution, actually.

But the vampire was going on. "Or, if she were to become other than what she now is, my superiors might lose interest in her, in time. They might forget about her altogether. Or they might cease to perceive her as a threat." He shrugged. "In either case, changing her might help to keep her alive."

"But what if she doesn't want to change?" Neil asked, belligerently. "What if she wants to stay the way she is now? There's nothing wrong with being human, you know."

The dark eyes moved to him now, and Mary shivered to see the expression on the assassin's face.

"You promised you only wanted to talk," she said hastily, before either one of them did something more.

She wished she could communicate mentally with Neil that he should stay silent and not provoke the vampire. She didn't sense that Neil understood, really understood, how dangerous their Night World visitor was. She could see it in the way Samuel Gregory stood, the way he tilted his head as he eyed them. As a predator herself, she could see the predator in him.

And the predator in him was several levels of strength and ruthlessness above the predator in her.

"I gave my word," Samuel Gregory said, after a few seconds. He turned back to Mary, ignoring Neil again. "And I hold my word sacred. But I also gave my word to obey my orders, and my orders were to find Anne Jamison and kill her. If I can kill her, therefore, I will. If you are her friend, or if you know of any friends she may have, they will get her out of my way before I strike."

"By kidnapping her and forcing her to leave her home? Or by forcing her to change against her will?" Neil clearly had no intention of staying out of this. "That's wrong. Just plain wrong." He emphasized the last word. "If you're too sick and twisted to see that, I do."

Samuel Gregory acted as if he hadn't heard Neil's insults. Mary wondered if he didn't consider a vermin's insults to be worth responding to. Or perhaps it was just a matter of Samuel Gregory's determination to keep his word.

"I'll see what I can do," she said, carefully.

"Mary!"

Samuel Gregory gave her a curt nod. "It will probably take me a day, perhaps two, to determine whether Miss Jamison has any friends here. Friends, I might add, who might be of interest to the Night World council. To which I am bound to report."

A shiver ran along Mary's spine.

"But if Miss Jamison disappears before then, my primary reason for being here also disappears, and I would not bother to pursue any secondary reasons. I would be busy trying to find out where Miss Jamison had gone. That would be difficult, no doubt, and so it would absorb all my attention."

In other words, Mary thought, she'd been warned to get Anne to a Daybreak safehouse within 48 hours or Samuel Gregory would kill both Anne and her. And probably Neil as well, since Samuel Gregory had almost certainly been able to tell that Neil was a Daybreaker, and not just a human that she'd deceived into going out with her.

She allowed herself to shut her eyes in despair for a single second. When she opened them, Neil was exclaiming, and Samuel Gregory was nowhere to be seen.

She waited. Nothing happened. She saw no one but Neil, smelled no one. No one struck her from behind. Samuel Gregory apparently intended to honor their truce.

"Come on," she told Neil. "Let's go home."

As they walked, Neil kept sputtering about Samuel Gregory. He'd never seen such an arrogant guy. They should get together—Anne, Amaranth, Mary, and Neil—and teach him a lesson. He'd heard about arrogant, evil Nightworlders, but he'd never imagined that they could be quite that arrogant and evil.

"It's just plain wrong to ask us to kidnap Anne," he said finally, when they had almost reached his house. "He wouldn't understand that, of course, since he's already kidnapped her once himself. But even if we think we're acting for her own good, it would be wrong of us to force her to leave for a safehouse."

"Yes, Neil," Mary agreed wearily. "I didn't say it was right."

"And it would be even more wrong to change Anne against her will. If she wanted to change, that would be one thing. But she shouldn't be changed against her will."

"I agree."

"You wouldn't do that, would you? Turn her into a shifter against her will?"

Mary thought. She'd never done something like that, but she'd thought about it. Mostly in kindergarten, when some of the other kids had pushed her in the playground and laughed at her. She'd told her mother about her thoughts, mostly as a joke, but her mother hadn't seen the joke. She'd punished Mary and then had a very long talk with her. Changing people to shifters wasn't a joke. It was something that you could be executed for, and the person you changed might be executed too. They had to be careful, ceaselessly careful, and they should never even talk about changing anyone unless they really meant to do it.

"No," she said. "I wouldn't."

"He's evil," Neil said vehemently. "Everything we're fighting against. I feel as if I never truly understood before how evil the Night World can be—the Circle Midnight part of it, at least. People like this need to be stopped. He deserves to die himself, after what he's probably done to other girls like Anne in the past."

"I . . . don't know," Mary said.

"You don't know?"

"I mean—I mostly agree with you. But people can change. That's part of what Daybreak is about. Giving people a chance to change, and to live a better life."

"Not people like him. You can't believe that he would ever change, no matter how many chances he was given. He's prejudiced and evil, and he's what we're fighting against. Exactly the sort of person we're fighting against."

"We should still give him a chance to change," Mary insisted. "We should give everyone a chance."

They stopped in front of Neil's driveway. With her better-than-average night vision, Mary could see Neil frowning at her.

"You're too good," he said. "You want to think good of everyone. But a guy like that isn't going to change. Believe me."

"Maybe you're right," Mary said. She didn't want to argue.

He kissed her quickly. "Are you going to talk to Amaranth about this?"

"I'll call her this evening and tell her that we saw the assassin and what he said to us."

"Fine." He kissed her again. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"'Night," she said. She waited until he was inside and she could hear him turning the locks behind him. Then she turned away for the long, solitary walk home.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Anne was taking a quiz in her history class when the door opened and a student she didn't know entered. Anne tensed slightly, but the student merely walked to the front of the room and gave an envelope to Ms. Green, the teacher. Ms. Green opened it, read the note inside, and frowned slightly.

"Anne." Ms. Green gestured that she ought to come to the desk.

Anne set her pencil down slowly and came.

"They need to see you in the principal's office," Ms. Green said softly, when Anne reached the desk. "Just leave your quiz here. We'll find some way for you to make it up later, if they keep you after the bell."

"Do you know why they need to see me?"

Ms. Green shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. They haven't told me." She glanced at the clock, which showed fifteen minutes before the end of the period. "You'd better take your books with you, just in case."

Anne went back to her desk, grabbed her notebook and history text, and followed the other student out of the room.

As she approached the office, she felt the now-familiar sensation of dread and fear. She had no idea why she was being summoned, but she doubted it was to get good news. And she didn't even know what classes Amaranth and Mary and Neil had right now. She had no way to reach them.

Well, she'd said she wanted to stay and fight. So that's what she would do. If Samuel Gregory was inside and waiting for her, she'd show him that she wasn't about to die meekly.

She entered the office with her head held high.

But Samuel Gregory was nowhere in sight. The only person there was the secretary, who gestured her toward the principal's office.

Inside, the principal was talking in a low voice to a policewoman. Anne hesitated in the doorway.

"Ah, Anne. Come inside. This is Anne Jamison," the principal said to the policewoman. "Anne, please close the door behind you."

Samuel was nowhere in sight, which was some relief to Anne's tense nerves. But the sight of the policewoman was not reassuring.

"Anne," the policewoman said, as soon as Anne had shut the door, "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."

"Anne's mother was shot?" Amaranth looked horrified.

Mary nodded. "That's what the rumor is, anyway. The police came and got Anne out of her history class and took her to the hospital."

"Ms. Jamison isn't dead, then?"

"I heard that they were operating on her, so I guess not."

"We have to do something," Neil said. "This has to stop. We have to fight back in some way."

"But he's her soulmate—" Amaranth's face crumpled suddenly. "How can this be happening? This isn't supposed to happen! The soulmate principle is supposed to solve everything—."

"I guess it isn't going to solve everything this time," Neil said. "I tell you, we need to do something. Fight back and stop him, before he tries to kill someone else."

"Maybe the first thing we should do is go to the hospital and see Anne," Mary said practically. "She needs friends right now."

"This is my fault," Amaranth said. "I told her that everything would be all right because Samuel was her soulmate. I believed he couldn't do anything like this to her. I told her not to worry." She started to cry.

Neil clenched his fists. "That guy should be dead."

"Let's just go to the hospital, okay? That's all we can do now."

"The doctors think she'll be all right," Anne told them. Her face was blotched white and red, as if she'd been frightened into crying. Which, Mary thought, she probably had been.

"That's good," Amaranth said. "Anne, I'm so sorry. We all are—."

"It's all right."

"But this is my fault. I told you that you could trust Samuel, that he was your soulmate. . . ."

"It's all right," Anne interrupted. Her voice was gentle, but something about it caused Mary to look at Anne more sharply.

"I think I'll need . . .what Neil talked about getting me before."

The gun, Mary thought.

Anne turned to Neil. "Do you still think you can get it for me, Neil?"

The boy nodded grimly. "Yes. I'm pretty sure I can."

"As soon as you can would be good."

What was wrong with Anne's voice, Mary thought, finally pinpointing her intuition, was not anything that you could hear. It was something that you couldn't hear. Anne wasn't crying any more. She didn't sound upset. Rather, she didn't sound as if she felt anything at all. The girl who had tried to learn sword-fighting from Mary had disappeared, leaving a blank-faced doll behind.

She's in shock, Mary guessed.

The doll turned toward Amaranth.

"Amaranth, you said you could help me, too."

Amaranth, who had started crying again, sniffed and wiped the tears away.

"Yes," she said fiercely. "Yes. I can give you a spell that will kill a vampire. Though it might not work if he's got protection spells around him," she added. "And it will take a little while to get all the ingredients."

"I think maybe we ought to talk about this," Mary began.

Amaranth turned on her angrily. "This isn't the time to talk any more! Neil's right, we have to do something! Samuel Gregory is bad. He's pure evil. You fight evil, not talk about it!"

"He can change," Mary said stubbornly. "That's what Daybreak believes. We can all change."

"He doesn't deserve the opportunity to change! Not any more."

"I think he's sick and screwed-up," Neil contributed.

"He doesn't want to change," Anne said, in the same empty voice she'd been using. "So there's nothing we can do but fight him. That's all that there's left to do."

Mary cut a quick, worried glance in Anne's direction. She didn't think that Anne should be making any decisions while she was still obviously in shock. "Maybe you should rest a while and think about it," she suggested.

"I don't need to think about it. I've already thought about it. He shot my mother, and I'm going to kill him." Anne's voice didn't waver in the slightest. Didn't rise or fall with any emotion.

For some reason, Mary remembered a story she'd once read about a poet who'd fallen in love with a beautiful girl who sewed in her cottage all day long. Too late, he'd found out that his beloved was a mechanical doll who wielded her sewing scissors to cut out people's eyes. She felt no remorse, of course, because she was only a doll. In order to save himself, the poet had been forced to hack her apart with an ax that had been conveniently leaning against the cottage wall.

Looking at Anne's blank face, Mary could imagine her friend's hand firmly gripping a pair of sewing scissors. Or was she the poet, forced into violence by Samuel Gregory's heartlessness? Mary didn't know.

"You should still rest," she tried again.

But she'd never been good with words, and she felt that none of them was listening now. Amaranth, Neil, and the blank-faced thing that had been Anne. They were all determined to throw themselves into ridding the world of the vampire calling himself Samuel Gregory.

She'd been outvoted. Mary looked away, unhappily, while the other three started to make plans.

The six-hundred-year-old vampire who'd served the Night World council for half a millennium was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. There was still a day left of the two-day period he'd given his human soulmate to flee to a Daybreak safehouse. He didn't have anything to do except to wait.

He was sorry, in a distant and remote way, for Anne Jamison. Or Anne Farmer, to give her the last name her father had used as an alias. He supposed it didn't really matter how he thought of her.

He didn't really have any particular hatred of her. She'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was her misfortune, and perhaps his as well, though he thought the whole situation was probably easier on him than on her. He was six hundred years old, after all, and in that time he'd learned to cope with problems. He was probably more able to deal with the shock of finding an unsuitable soulmate than she was.

In theory, soulmates were supposed to be made for one another, two halves of a spiritual whole. He thought that this might be perfectly true. The only problem was that he'd lived too long, and he and Anne were now out of synch, so to speak. If he'd met Anne when they'd both been seventeen and he'd been human, probably everything would have worked out reasonably well. They could have had a fine time growing up together, and then growing old together.

But as it was, he'd gone his own path alone, and he was simply too far down it now to be able to consider Anne as anything other than a nuisance. Night World assassins didn't need soulmates. In fact, they needed not to have soulmates. He'd been alone for six hundred years, and however lonely he'd been at times, he knew he'd adjusted to his situation.

Maybe that was it. He'd adjusted to his situation. To being a vampire, to being hundreds of years older than the vermin around him, to being an assassin. The part of him who might have had something in common with Anne Jamison was six hundred years gone. He couldn't see an echo of himself in her. He couldn't even dream of falling in love with her, the way most soulmates allegedly did.

He'd heard that some vermin were reincarnated over and over again, becoming something called "Old Souls." Perhaps Anne was one of those. Perhaps she'd had a life when he'd been human, six hundred years ago. They hadn't met then, and she'd eventually died, only to be reborn now.

Well. He didn't know if he believed in Old Souls—he scarcely believed in the soulmate principle, even though he apparently had a soulmate of his own—but there was some reassurance in the thought that Anne might be an Old Soul. If she'd lived one life without him, she could perfectly well live a second one. In fact, for all he knew, she'd already lived several lifetimes without him. It was hardly cruel of him to demand that she continue to live her lives in the same way that she'd apparently been doing.

He'd go on living his way, she'd go on living her way, and things would be back to normal again. They'd both suffer, perhaps, but suffering was normal. That was one of the things his six hundred years had taught him.

He simply hoped that Anne would have the good sense to reconsider and leave, or that her friends would have the good sense to persuade or force her to do what was in her best interests. He didn't want to have anything to do with the girl who might have been a match for his soul when he too had been young and innocent, six hundred years ago, but neither did he want to torture her to death. In fact, as far as he was concerned, torturing anyone to death was an extremely unpleasant matter to be done only when necessary.

Unfortunately, from the point of view of those who held his oath, it was frequently necessary.

She had another day to make up her mind, and so he had another day to wait for her decision. He shut his eyes and let himself drift toward sleep.

"I need the gun by tomorrow evening," Anne said coldly. "He'll come for me tomorrow evening. The two days will be up then. Can you get me the gun by then?"

"I will," Neil promised.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

But, as it turned out, Samuel Gregory arrived before evening.

Anne had gone to school that morning, mostly because she wasn't sure what else to do. The doctors had told her that her mother wasn't in danger from the gunshot wound. Ms. Jamison had been put in a private room, and although it was against hospital rules, the nurses had let Anne sleep there that night on a big chair that folded out.

Anne hadn't slept much, even though her mother was better and thought they were safe. She didn't believe that even a ruthless Night World assassin would try to come for them in a hospital. Some places had to be off limits for killing, didn't they? And even if her soulmate wouldn't respect the hospital as a no-kill ground, it would be difficult even for him to kill in a hospital and get away with it. There were nurses everywhere.

So many nurses, in fact, that Anne had trouble sleeping despite the stress and exhaustion of the day. She'd never realized how noisy a hospital was. But there were constant beeps, both from the machines around her mother and machines in the hallway, and she could hear the nurses talking softly to one another. The noise never became overwhelmingly loud, but it never stopped, either.

She finally fell soundly asleep around 4 am. She might have slept until noon, except a nurse came into the room and started to speak to her mother about breakfast. Anne's eyes flew open.

"Mom?"

"Good morning, darling." Ms. Jamison's face turned toward Anne was pale and drawn, but she smiled. Anne was both frightened to see how fragile her mother looked and relieved to see that her mother was awake and rational. People died in the hospital after they went into comas, right? Not when they were awake and talking to you.

"How are you feeling?" she asked instantly. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the nurse smiling as she occupied herself with checking Ms. Jamison's IV drip.

"Not too bad, actually. Still foggy, though."

"The doctor's prescribed pain-killing medication for you," the nurse interjected cheerfully.

Another miniscule part of Anne relaxed at the nurse's tone. Surely the nurse wouldn't sound so cheerful and unworried if her mother really had been in danger?

"You'll be late for school, darling," Ms. Jamison said, squinting at the large clock on the wall.

"But—" Anne hadn't even thought of going to school.

"Yes, we need to take care of your mother, give her a sponge bath, and do other things she probably won't want you to see," the nurse said, just as cheerfully as before. "Visiting hours are this afternoon."

And, after a few minutes, Anne had allowed herself to be persuaded to go to school. Where she'd promptly fallen asleep during her homeroom period. After she'd fallen asleep for the second time in her next class, her teacher had sent her to the guidance counselor, who'd set up a cot for her in an empty office and told her to sleep. Everyone knew about her mother's shooting, of course. Exhausted, Anne fell asleep to the monotonous humming of the copier running in the next room.

She didn't sleep long or well. The guidance counselor woke her for lunch. Anne was groggily putting her shoes back on when the door opened. She glanced up and froze.

Samuel Gregory was closing the door carefully behind him.

"What are you doing here?" were the first words that burst from her mouth.

"I wanted to see you before tonight."

A tiny hope was born in Anne that the nightmare was over and that her soulmate was finally going to start acting the way that everyone said soulmates were supposed to. That he'd tell her he realized he couldn't live without her, that he loved her.

She squelched the hope firmly. He'd shot her mother. Even if he'd somehow fallen in love with her the day before—which she thought was highly unlikely—she wasn't going to fall in love with him. He was an assassin, and he killed people. She didn't think she had any illusions any more about what sort of person he'd made himself into.

"I could yell for help."

"Everyone's gone for lunch. And the noise in your cafeteria is deafening. Does everyone shout over the table?"

"It's the only way to hear anyone."

"A perfect illustration of Cold War escalation theory," he commented. Anne had no idea what he was talking about.

"Are you here to kill me? I thought you were giving me two days to get out of town."

He looked at her somberly, and she felt something jolt and twist inside her.

He didn't look six hundred years old. Whatever that ought to look like on a living person's face. In most ways, he looked exactly her age. His face was smooth and unlined, his dark hair cut in a way that was stylish without having any particularly noticeable characteristics. He wasn't the sort of gorgeous guy that you stopped on the street to watch and dreamed about later that night, but he was good-looking in an unobtrusive way.

But there was something about his eyes, the expression on his face, that didn't look young or carefree. Not that he looked like a worried, stressed adult, either. Whatever he was, it wasn't anything she'd ever seen before. And despite her best resolve, part of her wanted to go and explore it. To learn what six hundred years felt like.

She couldn't. Her mother was in the hospital, recovering from the gunshot wound that this guy had given her. Presumably as a warning to Anne as to what he'd do later if Anne didn't flee. And Anne had seen the loathing on his face when they'd discovered their soulmate connection.

"I'm not here to kill you," he answered finally.

"Then what?"

"To give you one last chance. A last warning, before evening comes and I do my worst to you."

"You can warn me all you like, but I'm not leaving." Anne thought of Neil's promise to get her a gun. Would he manage to do it in time?

"Why are you being so stubborn?" he flashed at her suddenly. Anger was in his voice, and she realized that she'd never heard him angry before. Cold, determined, hostile, contemptuous—but never angry.

In some ways, it was the warmest emotion she'd ever gotten from him.

"I'm not helpless," she told him. "Whatever girls were like in the past—it's not true any more. I'm strong, and I can defend myself."

"This is all about gender?" For an instant, he sounded incredulous. "You're going to stay here, like an idiot duck in a hunter's gunsights, just because you want to make some point about gender?"

He'd said the wrong word, though. Anne felt her own anger spark.

"Speaking of guns, why did you shoot my mother?"

He just looked at her.

"Was it to hurt me in some way?" Anne persisted, when he didn't answer. "Was it to send me a message? She doesn't know anything about the Night World! Or did you think that my father might have told her something years ago before I was born?"

"I didn't shoot your mother."

"Liar."

She would not have thought that a vampire's pale face could grow more pale, but it seemed to do so then. Even his features appeared to become thinner, more sharp.

"I am not a liar," he said, very carefully. "I don't lie. I am an assassin, and my word is my bond. It has to be that way, because nothing else is my bond. Nothing. The only thing that anyone can ever trust about me is that I'm telling them the truth."

"And the truth is that your name is Samuel Gregory. And that you're a nice human guy who's just staying in town for a while. Or did you tell the people at the hotel that you're a vampire assassin for the Night World council? Did you really tell them the truth about yourself?"

"They were vermin," he said shortly.

"So you're not really a liar when you lie to vermin?" Anne pressed.

She knew she was being reckless. Taunting an assassin sent to kill her was like sticking her arm through the bars of a hungry lion's cage at the zoo. But her mother was lying in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound, and she didn't care. Even though, through the soulmate bond, she could distantly feel the fury that he was trying to keep from her.

"Secrecy is part of the Night World law," he told her. "I obey the law, as I am bound to do."

"How convenient."

He hissed at her, an oddly inhuman sound, and Anne froze. On second thought, maybe sticking her arm through the bars of the lion's cage hadn't been the best idea after all.

But he seemed to be trying to recover himself, too. Through her frozen terror, she noticed him taking a deep breath, moving his shoulders slightly to release stored tension. She took a deep breath of her own.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but you see, I don't know whether you're lying to me or not. After all, you think I'm vermin too, don't you?"

He didn't answer at once. "You're human," he finally said.

"Right. And you think that's vermin. Not really a person. Even though you were human once yourself."

He remained silent, looking at her.

"So you could lie to me, by your rules. Just the way that you can kill me without thinking twice about it. Because I'm human."

"I'm not here to kill you because you're human. I'm here to kill you because you violated Night World law."

"Why does it matter if I violated Night World law if I'm human? Nightworlders kill humans all the time and don't think they're committing murder because humans are vermin." Anne put all the sarcasm she could into the last word. "So if Nightworlders think they don't have to obey human law, why do they think that humans ought to obey their law?"

It seemed like a good argument to Anne, and she waited triumphantly for Samuel to agree with her, or to sneer and disagree, which seemed more likely. But he said nothing and simply gazed at her, pale and drawn.

"Well?" she prodded him, when he didn't answer.

He took in a deep breath and let it out. "I did not shoot your mother."

"I don't believe you," Anne said instantly. "All that speech you made me before about how easy it was to shoot people—that was a warning, wasn't it? I was just too stupid to see it."

"No. I did not shoot your mother. In fact, I haven't shot anyone since I came here."

"Would you swear it to me while we have our soulmate connection open?" Anne demanded. "So that I can look into your mind and see whether you're telling me the truth?"

"No." His response was very definite and very quick.

"Are you afraid I'll see you're lying?"

"No."

"Then what are you afraid of?"

He looked away for an instant. When he turned back to her, his gaze had hardened, as if he'd reached some decision that he knew she wouldn't like.

"You hate me, don't you?"

"You haven't given me any reason not to."

But he continued as if she hadn't spoken. "You think I'm a liar, and a coward, and a murderer."

"You're an assassin! You've said so yourself!"

"But not a murderer, because I kill in accordance with the law. Night World law. Which I obey," he went on, not giving her another chance to object to the idea that Night World law could apply to humans. "I serve the law, and whether you understand and believe that or not doesn't really matter. But the point is that we're now in a very unusual situation, one where I haven't known for a long time what to do. On the one hand, I need to kill you—"

"Thanks so much."

"—and, to be more specific, before I let you die, I need to torture you into giving me the names of everyone you know who violated Night World law by giving you information about it. The law of secrecy must be preserved."

"Torture me? Before you let me die? Let me?" Anne heard her voice rising with incredulity.

"But on the other hand, torturing you would be difficult when you're my soulmate. I might feel some of the pain you felt, no matter how hard I tried to shield myself, and that would make me less able to control and guide the torture appropriately. I need the information to carry out my mission successfully, so it's important that I get it. And your death might also temporarily shock me into failing to use my full abilities to hunt down and kill the Daybreakers who told you about the Night World and violated its law of secrecy."

"I'm so sorry." Anne hoped she didn't sound sorry at all.

"In short, it seems I need some other method to get the truth from you about who you've spoken to. Who the local Daybreakers are."

"I won't tell you. No matter what."

"You've already given away at least some of them," he told her gently. "Through the soulmate connection, the last time we touched. You can see parts of your soulmate's memories, you know."

And she'd reached out to him herself, trying to persuade him to give up the idea of hunting her. Anne felt sick. She'd given away Mary and Amaranth and Neil without even knowing it.

Or . . . maybe not? He said he'd seen some of her memories. He wasn't sure that he'd discovered all of the Daybreakers. Mary and Neil had told her about how Samuel had suddenly appeared to them two evenings before. But Amaranth hadn't seen Samuel Gregory. Perhaps he didn't yet know about Amaranth?

"I won't tell you anything more than you know already."

"But you will," he said. "Through the soulmate connection. All I have to do is touch you, and I'll know. You can't help it."

Anne took an involuntary step backward.

Something flared in his eyes. "Are you trying to run away from me?" he asked, very softly.

Anne shook her head mutely.

"You should know," he said, taking one smooth step forward, "that there's another way to form connections. For vampires, at least."

Anne said nothing. She'd already given too much away, without even realizing it until too late.

"A blood connection," he told her, "also tends to make it easier to read minds. Sometimes, anyway. I admit it doesn't always work."

He was close enough to touch her now. Anne started to take a step backward, but he caught her shoulders and held her. This near, she could feel the soulmate connection hum between them. She willed it away, imagining a huge brick wall between them.

It didn't quite work.

"My guess would be that the two together—soulmate connection and blood connection—should open your mind to me as far as possible. And then I'll have what I need from you, without any torture that would hurt both of us."

"No—" Anne got out, breathlessly.

But his lips had already drawn back from suddenly elongated white teeth.

Faster than she could react, she felt one of his hands leave her shoulder. It grasped her chin and pulled it up and to one side. The touch of skin to skin made her imagined brick wall collapse, and she felt the soulmate connection, strong and undeniable, arc and link them together.

Then those teeth darted for her throat. As she tried to jerk away, she felt their sting. He'd bitten her.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

Someone was shaking Anne's shoulder. She blinked and only then realized that her eyes had been shut.

Everything swam back slowly into focus. Ceiling. She was lying on her back on the floor, and a thin institutional carpet was underneath her, and she was looking up at the ceiling.

"Ms. Jamison?"

"Mm?" Ms. Jamison is my mother, she thought, but it was too much trouble to say that.

She turned her head instead and saw the principal bending over her.

That gave her a jolt. What was the principal doing there? For that matter, what was she doing on the floor? She automatically tried to sit up, and her head swam.

"Drink this." He handed her a glass of water. She drank automatically. The water tasted strange. Then her mind clicked back on fully, and she understood why the water was tasting strange.

After Samuel had bitten her, she'd felt him searching through her mind, hunting for her memories of Amaranth and Mary and Neil. She'd been angry, and he'd been careless enough to loosen his grip slightly on her chin. She'd bitten him. It was the coppery remnants of his blood in her mouth that she tasted now.

She gagged and stopped drinking the water. But it was too late. She'd probably already swallowed some of the blood. Almost certainly. She didn't actually remember swallowing any, but she'd bitten him, and the blood wasn't anywhere on her, was it?

She looked hastily down at her shirt. No, her clothes were clean.

So she must have swallowed his blood, even though she didn't remember having done so.

"Are you feeling all right?" That was the principal, again.

She felt sick at the thought of what she's swallowed, but she couldn't tell the principal that. In fact, Anne didn't know how she could explain why she'd been lying unconscious on the floor. "Yes," she said, and sipped again from the water glass while she tried to come up with a story that wouldn't involve Night World assassins or Daybreakers.

"You've missed your lunch period," the principal informed her. He sounded mildly irritated.

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"You'd better go to the third lunch period instead. With all the stress over your mother, you need to eat."

Anne felt a wash of relief. Apparently the principal thought that she was lying on the floor because she was upset over her mother. Crazy with grief, or something like that. She wouldn't have to come up with an explanation of her own.

"I am hungry," she agreed, even though she wasn't. "I'll go right now."

"You might want to stop at the restroom by the way and straighten yourself up a bit," the principal said. "Do you have a comb?"

"Um. In my purse."

"Good."

He stood still, waiting, and Anne realized that she was expected to leave for lunch right away. Wobbily, she stood and collected her books and purse. He ushered her out of the counselor's office and locked the door behind her. Anne wondered suddenly if she'd been violating some school rule by being alone in the office. She hadn't ever heard of such a rule for the counselor's office, but it was true that the students were hardly ever allowed to be out of sight.

In the restroom, she surveyed her face in the mirror. Her hair was a mess, and she fixed it as best she could. She also noticed a small smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, and she wiped it away hastily. She'd been lucky that the counselor's office had been dimly lit and that the principal hadn't noticed.

Details about what had just happened were coming back to her now. Samuel's mind probing within her own, touching and examining her memories in spite of everything she could do to keep him out. Even though she'd told him she hadn't wanted him there, something in her had welcomed him in. The soulmate connection, binding the two of them together in spite of the fact that neither of them wanted it. They were two halves of one person, even if they were as different as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

-Ah,- Samuel had said, sounding mildly pleased by what he'd discovered. Her heart had sunk. Who had she involuntarily betrayed now?

-Go away!- she'd shrieked at him. –Get out!-

-Soon. Not yet.-

-I hate you!-

-Of course. I am a monster, aren't I?-

She saw his bitter acceptance of what he'd become, his belief that he'd become one kind of monster in order to prevent himself from being an even worse monster, and it sickened her to realize that her soulmate, the other half of herself, had sold himself to the Night World council to be a passionless killer. Someone who obeyed orders, without consulting his own conscience.

If this was what he'd become, and they were alike enough to be soulmates, would she become the same?

She'd writhed against him. He was far stronger than she was, but he was using one hand to hold her chin. The other arm had been loosely around her shoulders. He hadn't expected her to fight him. Perhaps a vampire's prey didn't usually fight. But she was his soulmate, and she wasn't in any daze or hypnotic trance or whatever vampires used to keep people helpless. She pushed with all the strength in both her arms and tried to twist away.

He'd caught her, but not before she'd managed to shift herself a few inches. She'd felt the fingers of the hand that had been holding her chin against her lips, and she'd taken the opportunity to bite him. Hard. She'd tasted blood and felt a savage pleasure in the thought that she might be hurting him. She wanted to hurt him, as he was hurting her. Weren't they soulmates? They ought to suffer equally.

He might have hissed again, but his mouth was still locked to her throat. Instead, she'd felt a harsh burn of pain and anger flash from his mind. And another wave of that deep, deep dislike, a repulsion he felt for all things that came from vermin.

She tried to see his memory of his drawing a bead on her mother, pulling the trigger, but she couldn't find it. She'd been overwhelmed by his pain and anger and hatred, and she hadn't been able to maintain control. She'd flung her own pain and anger and hatred back at him as she fell into blackness.

That was all she could remember. She must have fainted. Maybe he'd taken too much blood from her, and she'd fainted from blood loss? But no, she felt more or less all right now. He'd probably just hit her with some kind of telepathic blow. Amaranth had warned her that strong vampires were able to knock humans unconscious. Whatever else Samuel Gregory was, he was strong.

So strong, in fact, that she had no idea how she was going to beat him.

He lay on his back on his hotel bed, staring up at the ceiling again. He might have drifted asleep—it was afternoon—but he'd drunk fresh blood too recently to sleep. The energy buzzed through his veins and kept him restless.

Someone knocked at the door. He ignored the noise, and the second knock which came afterward.

A few seconds later, the phone rang. He ignored that too.

When he felt an irritated mind reach out to touch his own, though, he frowned. Standing up, he crossed the room to the door and opened it.

The blond boy standing there looked slightly older than Samuel. He wasn't.

But he was much older than he looked.

"Come in, Farro," Samuel sighed. He stepped aside to let the other enter.

Farro stepped gracefully into the room. He dropped a black leather bag on the dresser, looked around to find a chair, and sighed as he sprawled comfortably into the nearest one. Running one hand through his streaked hair, he glanced sideways at Samuel through pale blue eyes.

"Was this the best place you can find?"

"I'm on an ordinary expense account. Not an extraordinary one."

"You could have made some excuse. My God, look at that picture over the bed. You ought to burn it."

Samuel did not turn to look at the still life of pastel flowers in a pastel vase. "The hotel serves my purposes. The point is to be inconspicuous."

"Yes, I know. What a good little Night World servant you are. You never break any of the rules, do you?"

"I kill other people when they break the rules."

"As you should, because there's a rule about what to do with people who break rules." Farro did not change his sprawling position, but his tone seemed to alter slightly with his next words. "Have you broken any rules recently, by the way?"

Samuel, who had been fingering the leather strap of Farro's bag as if to judge its quality, looked up at this.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well," Farro said lightly, "there is the fact that I've been dispatched by the Night World council to come investigate the situation."

After a long minute, Samuel turned away to examine the strap again. "Are you here to investigate the situation? Or me?"

"There is the fact that you still haven't finished what the council thought would be an easy assignment. Or have you just finished it? I notice you've eaten."

"No."

"Well, then. The council was concerned. Especially after your phone call, when you asked permission to change your target into one of us. Whatever possessed you, by the way?"

"It isn't your problem."

"I'm afraid it is my problem now. The Night World council's sent me to look into things and settle them myself. If you feel yourself incapable of doing so."

Samuel let the strap to drop from his fingers. There was no place to sit, but he leaned against the wall and allowed himself to stare at Farro from under half-closed eyelids.

"I can handle things."

"Then why haven't you?"

No answer.

"Samuel—that's what you're calling yourself now, right?—talk to me! We've been friends for a couple of hundred years. I don't know what's going on with you and the council. The council isn't happy with you, and I don't know why, because the council's always respected your work up to now. They've sent me here to wrap things up and, if necessary, wrap you up too."

He paused, but Samuel only lifted his dark eyebrows and waited.

"I don't know what's going on. I'm willing to do what I can to help you get yourself out of this mess, whatever it is, because you've done me a couple of favors in the past. But I need to know what's going on. Why haven't you killed the girl, and why did you call the council and ask for permission to change her?"

Samuel just looked at him.

With a sigh, Farro added, "Whatever you tell me will be between the two of us. I'll keep your secret, whatever it is."

"Will you swear to it?"

Another sigh. "Yes."

A pause. Samuel smiled faintly.

"You haven't actually sworn yet, you know," he murmured. "Do you swear to it now?"

Farro's pale face flushed, but if he was angry, he restrained himself. "Yes."

"Say it."

"I so swear."

"And that you swear in good faith, hiding no second meanings behind your words, and that you are making your oath of your own free will, because a forced oath is not valid."

"You're really being cautious," Farro observed coolly. "I swear in good faith and of my own free will. Now are you satisfied?"

"Moderately." As Farro's blue eyes rolled and lifted toward the ceiling, Samuel added, "I did you a service once by killing your target when you wouldn't."

"That was a long time ago," Farro said cautiously. "And I've already admitted that I owe you a favor."

Samuel ignored this. "You thought the girl might be your soulmate, and that's why you didn't want to kill her yourself. Do you remember?"

Farro shifted slightly in the hotel chair. "Vaguely." His tone was suddenly very casual. "It was at least a hundred years ago. Or was it two hundred?"

"I think you remember."

Farro said nothing.

"You asked me to take care of the matter instead, so I did. And I told the Night World council that you hadn't killed her because you'd been wounded in an accident and were temporarily disabled."

"You neglected to mention that the accident had happened at weapons practice when you deliberately stabbed me after we'd stopped our workout."

"I thought you'd be skilled enough to stop me even if I attacked you without warning," Samuel said tranquilly. "So I tried, and you didn't. It was an accident."

"And there wasn't any need to give the Night World council all the facts, was there?"

"The council has always given me some discretion. I exercised it then."

"Right," Farro sighed. "So you killed the girl for me, and, um--shall we say misled? That's a nice word—you misled the council when you reported on the incident."

Samuel shrugged. "You seemed grateful at the time. And equally disinclined to give the council a fuller version of the facts."

Farro's smile was thin. "How could I tell them the truth, when you'd told them otherwise, and I was in your debt?"

"I didn't lie to them."

"No. You just gave them a limited version of the truth." Farro tilted his head slightly. "I don't know why you bother to make such fine distinctions. Do you think the Night World council would forgive you if it found that you hadn't actually lied, just misled them a little?"

"I swore an oath to obey the Night World council's orders, and that involves telling them the truth. I've kept my oath."

"Your famous oath." Farro sighed again. "No other assassin takes that oath quite as seriously as you do. Did you know that?"

"Does it matter?" Samuel countered.

"Get to the point. You killed my soulmate for me, so I'm in your debt. I know that. What does any of this have to do with your problem with your current target?"

Samuel sighed and began to explain.

"Here," Neil said, handing Anne the pistol. Anne took it gingerly.

It was much heavier than she'd thought, and much more frightening. Somehow, even though she'd said before that she was willing to shoot Samuel Gregory to protect herself, she hadn't quite understand what that would mean.

There's nothing that this was meant to do except kill someone, she thought, looking at it.

Knives were tools that you could use in a kitchen, as well as to defend yourself. You could fight with sticks, or you could use them as canes or staffs to help you walk. But there was nothing you could do with a gun except use it to hurt someone.

Shooting someone is evil, Anne thought.

She looked at Neil, who looked back at her more soberly than she'd have expected.

"Are you still sure you want this?" Neil asked.

Anne wondered if he was having second thoughts himself, or if he'd seen uncertainty cross her face.

"Yes," she said, after a second. "Samuel Gregory shot my mother. And he's killed other people, horribly. Amaranth found that out from the Daybreakers in Rome."

"Your mother said she didn't see who shot her," Neil reminded her. "The police think that maybe it's a drive-by shooting."

"A drive-by shooting," Anne scoffed. "Circle Daybreak knows better."

Neil hesitated. "We don't have any proof, though."

"We don't need it," Anne said firmly. "He talked about how easy it was to kill people. He tried to kill me. Then my mother gets shot. Who else could it have been? If she didn't see who shot her, that just makes it even more likely that Samuel Gregory did it. He's good enough that he could shoot her from hiding and get away before anyone tried to go after him."

"Yeah. It's just—." Neil shifted his weight. "I got you the gun, so I'd feel bad if you shot the wrong person."

"I'm not going to shoot the wrong person. I'm going to protect myself from the guy who's already kidnapped me and told me he'll kill me and shot my mother. Do you have any bullets?"

"Here." Neil gave her a box of cartridges.

"Are they wooden?"

"Where would I get wooden bullets? No, they're just regular cartridges."

Anne looked at him, dismayed.

Neil shrugged. "If you shoot him enough times in the head, I don't think it matters. That's what Mary says about shifters, anyway. It may take more than one bullet, but even a Nightworlder can't survive if you blow enough of him away."

Anne looked at the gun and the cartridges. She stifled another wave of doubt.

She wasn't weak. She was a modern twenty-first century young woman. She could defend herself. She could fight back.

"Do you know how to use a gun?" Neil asked. "Can you load it? Clean it?"

"Does it have to be cleaned?"

Neil sighed. "My father owns a couple of rifles. He's showed me how to load them and clean them after they've been shot. Here. I'll show you what I know."

Anne took a deep breath. Let it out.

"If you can show me what you know," she said quietly, "I'll do the rest."

She pushed away the feeling that she was out of her depth, that maybe she was doing the wrong thing. She could fight back. She was not going to be weak. Whatever it took, she'd fight back.

Even if it meant shooting her soulmate.

"Well," Farro said. "That was a touching story."

Samuel shrugged.

"Soulmates. Who could have invented such a curse? Someone who hangs on you like a leech. . . ."

"I think we're supposed to be the leeches, actually."

"Don't interrupt. And was that a joke?" Farro peered at the other vampire's face suspiciously. "You never joke."

"I never had a soulmate before, either."

"See." Farro pointed a mildly accusatory finger. "She's changing you. An assassin can't ever let himself be influenced by his target. By anything. We've been honed for our task."

"There's very little honing involved, you know. That's just propaganda. One bullet is all it takes. Nine times out of ten, killing a person is completely uncomplicated."

"One bullet, and a lot of training in how to place it," Farro objected. "No. I like to think of myself as well-trained and an expert at a difficult task."

"You can think of it however you want to."

"And what I think is that you're a valuable tool of the Night World council. Too valuable to lose because some vermin-- the daughter of a slayer, even worse!—happens to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Samuel shrugged again.

"Kill her."

Samuel looked at Farro.

"Did you get the information you wanted when you drank from her today?"

"I got some of it. Whether I got all of it . . . who knows?"

"Get the rest of it fast. Somehow. And then kill her."

Samuel continued to look at him.

Farro moved a hand restlessly. "I didn't tell you everything. The council isn't just wondering what's wrong with you. They want you dead. Both you and the vermin. They think you're planning to betray them, or that you already have done so, like John Quinn did."

"Quinn wasn't an assassin. He hadn't taken an oath."

"Enough of your damned oath! It doesn't matter how much you stick to it! All that matters is whether the council thinks you're going to stick to it, and right now, the council thinks that you're a liability, not an asset. They sent me here to kill you if I had the slightest doubt about what you might be planning. You're just lucky that they sent me." He paused. "Do you want me to kill her for you? You once did me the same favor, after all."

"No."

Farro studied him. "You'll do it yourself, then?"

"Yes." There was no emotion in Samuel Gregory's voice. "I swore to obey the council's orders. They ordered me to kill her. I'll kill her."

"Do it soon," Farro said. There was no more friendliness in his voice. "Or I'll have to carry out my orders and kill you both. I owe you a favor, but it's not a big enough favor for me to risk being slated for termination by the council. And I really doubt Circle Daybreak would take me in. Even if they overlooked the little fact that I've been killing Daybreakers for years, I once asked you to kill my soulmate. They wouldn't like that."

"No. I don't suppose they would."

Farro got to his feet. "I've got the room next to yours. We'll be in touch. Call me if you change your mind and want me to take care of her for you." He left.

Without turning, Samuel Gregory listened to the snick of the door closing behind his friend and fellow assassin. It was a very final sound.

Tomorrow, he thought.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

Anne had intended to hunt Samuel Gregory down and shoot him before he could kill her. She quickly found the problem with her plan.

She had no idea where he was.

She didn't know what hotel he was staying at. She didn't know if the hotel was in the town, or if it was in a city a hundred miles away. A hundred miles, after all, was only a couple of hours' drive.

She didn't even know if he was staying in a hotel at all. Maybe some members of Circle Midnight had allowed him to stay with them. Maybe he was staying in one of the infamous black flower clubs. Maybe he'd brainwashed some humans into letting him stay in their house.

For all she knew, Samuel Gregory had a tent out in the woods and was camping there. Or he'd found a cave. Or he'd built himself a treehouse.

She doubted the treehouse, actually. She couldn't picture Samuel Gregory sitting in a tree. But she had no clue where he was, or how to find him.

"What should I do?" she asked Amaranth at lunch. "How do you track someone down who doesn't want to be found?"

"Well . . . you could use a spell. I guess."

"Can you do a spell like that?"

"If you have something of his, I could."

"Like what?"

"Hair, nail clippings. . . ."

"Ick," Anne said succinctly. "No. I don't have anything like that. Is there any other way?"

Amaranth frowned, twirling a pencil between her fingers. "I don't know. Maybe. I'll think about it." She stared down at her hands.

"Hurry," Anne said. "Before he kills someone else."

Anne thought she'd sounded mature and self-assured. But Amaranth's face, when she raised it, was troubled and uncertain.

"Anne . . . are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes! Of course! Don't you agree that it's the only thing to do? You did before."

"Yes . . . I guess." Amaranth didn't sound happy. "I just . . . . It's such a big step to take."

"He deserves to die," Anne said. She had never been so convinced of anything in the world as she was convinced of that now.

"Probably he does. But . . . he's your soulmate."

"He still killed that witch in Rome," Anne reminded Amaranth.

"Yes." The doubt faded from Amaranth's face.

"I need whatever help you can give me," Anne told Amaranth. "Spells, advice, information, whatever. I'm going to stop this monster from hurting anyone else. He's never going to do again what he did to my mother. And what he tried to do to me. In the hospital, you said you could give me a spell that would help me stop him."

"I'm working on it. It's not easy getting some of the ingredients. And it takes time to mix everything and let it combine properly."

"Hurry," Anne repeated, grimly. "I need to track him down as soon as possible."

But, as it turned out, she didn't have to solve the problem of how to track Samuel Gregory down. He came to her instead.

She was in her bedroom, packing her backpack with clothes to wear to school the next day. While her mother was in the hospital, she was sleeping at Mary's house. Mary had offered to come keep Anne company while she packed, but Anne had declined.

"I warned you to leave," the voice came from behind her.

Anne started. She hadn't heard any doors open. But in retrospect, she assumed that Samuel Gregory, assassin extraordinaire, was capable of moving with perfect silence.

Angry at herself for betraying her surprise, she turned slowly.

He stood there watching her, no expression on his own face. For the first time, it came to her that the predatory way that he held himself was not only threatening, but that it was oddly beautiful as well. She might hate and despise him, but if he'd been different inside, or if she hadn't recognized him for what he was, she might have found him attractive.

She pushed the thought aside. He'd shown her what he truly was, and there was nothing attractive about it.

"You warned me," she agreed. "But I decided to stay and fight."

"You lost our last fight."

"I'm still here. Alive and well. In spite of everything you've been able to do."

His lips quirked. "You think that what I've done is all that I can do?"

She was sick of his laughing at her. Why did he always look down on her? Why couldn't he accept her as another person, even if not his equal in every way?

"You're not going to hurt anyone again, ever," she told him.

The half-smile on his lips disappeared. She hoped, for an instant, that it was because he had taken her seriously for once. But no, his eyes had gone unfocused and distant.

"Would that that were true," he said.

She jammed her hands into the pockets of the jacket she'd been wearing all day and took a step toward him. His eyes came back into focus instantly, alert and cool.

"I mean it," she warned him.

"Well, I meant it too," he said lightly.

Another step. He didn't move, but she could feel alertness humming through his body. He'd expected her to run or to beg for mercy, she was sure. He hadn't expected her to walk toward him, as if she was unafraid.

She could feel her heart pounding in terror, as it seemed to do so often when she was around him. But inside her mind she could feel, hard and sharp as a cut diamond, her determination to fight back.

He was almost close enough to touch now. She hesitated. Should she get closer, or not?

He solved her dilemma by taking the last step between them. Reaching out, his fingers threaded themselves through her hair. He tilted her head back, not roughly but firmly, and his other hand lifted to pull her collar away from her throat.

She couldn't stop her involuntary reaction to pull away. "Let me go!"

"I need all the information you have on Circle Daybreak."

"I'm not going to give it to you!"

"You already did. Most of it, anyway. But I need to make sure I have all of it. If you relax, it won't hurt."

"Is that all you can think about? Not whether you're doing what's right or wrong? Just whether it's going to hurt or not?"

He was so close to her that she felt his breath across her cheek as he spoke. "What I'm going to do has already been determined by my oath. All I'm free to do is to make it as painless as possible."

His cool fingers were underneath her collar, now, pushing the cloth away.

"No!" She saw his head dip lower, felt that breath touch the hollow between her jaw and her shoulder. Yanking the gun from her pocket, she fired.

She'd expected him to be flung backward by the force of the shot. That always happened in the movies. But he only jerked slightly from the impact.

He stopped moving toward her throat, though, and started to raise his head.

Anne didn't know what to do. She had to finish what she'd started; she couldn't let him live now. He'd certainly kill her now, if she didn't kill him first. She pulled the trigger again and again, aiming blindly at his body. Her ears hurt from the noise, and she could smell an odd scent of smoke and other things that she couldn't identify. Her hand hurt from trying to hold the weight of the gun in the right direction. She hadn't expected the gun to recoil, either.

When she pulled the trigger again, the gun merely clicked.

Holding the gun in front of her, she tried desperately to shoot Samuel Gregory again. Surely she hadn't run out of bullets already?

But the chamber clicked emptily again and again. She'd emptied the entire chamber into Samuel's body, and he was still standing in front of her. If bloody, and looking somewhat shaky.

In desperation, she threw the gun itself at him and turned, hoping that she could escape through a window before he could collect his strength enough to come after her.

He caught her hair, then her arm, before she'd gone more than a step. She turned and hit at him, fighting to free herself. She felt blood across her fingers, and she would have vomited if she had had time for it. Instead, she pushed and hit and kicked at him as hard as she could.

He was still stronger. With six bullets in him, he was still stronger than she was. She couldn't get away.

She managed to knock him off balance, though, and they both went to the floor. She hit her elbow on her oak dresser as they fell, and she cried out involuntarily in pain. His head hit the corner of the dresser a moment later, and he hissed in a response that seemed as involuntary as her cry. She could see the flash of those white, curved teeth.

Then his hand was in her hair again, yanking her head backward with much less care than he'd shown before, and his teeth struck her throat fast and hard. It hurt. She screamed again and then lay still, paralyzed with pain and something that held her immobile in spite of her desperate desire to struggle away.

There was blood in her mouth again. She could taste it. His hair, falling into her face as he bent over her, was covered with blood. She couldn't turn her head away to avoid it.

But worse than the blood, worse than anything, was the feel of his angry mind as he ransacked her memories. Through the exchange of blood, through the soulmate connection, his presence surrounded and overwhelmed her. There was nothing in her world that was not him. She wanted to hate him, but there was hardly anything left of her that was separate enough to feel hatred. It was as if nearly her entire self had been drawn into him, his rage and his hunger and pain, and the tiny part that was still recognizably Anne was a candle's weak flicker next to his bonfire.

Amaranth said that having a soulmate meant finding a person who'd share his soul with you, Anne thought through her daze. Not that it meant losing your soul to another person.

Some part of her resisted, though. She hadn't felt this the last time he'd bitten her, didn't know where the newborn flicker of strength was coming from. But with a last desperate burst of will, she used it to hang onto consciousness and life.

Then, when she'd almost given up, the pain ended. The soulmate connection faded and shrank away. She blinked and realized, groggily, that Samuel Gregory's face was hovering above her own. He was looking down at her own blood-smeared face, and a precious few inches of distance separated them.

Panting, she stared up at him.

The blood was still matting his hair and running down his face. Wood, Anne realized dizzily. The dresser was made of oak. Samuel Gregory was a vampire, and he could be hurt by wood.

He didn't seem to be bleeding anywhere else, though. His clothes had small bloodstains and holes where the bullets had penetrated, but the stains weren't getting any bigger.

She'd failed, Anne realized. In spite of everything, she'd failed in her attempt to defend her mother and herself.

He didn't seem interested in attacking her again, though. His eyes roved over her face, half-distant again, as if he were making a set of private calculations.

"So you've formally joined Circle Daybreak."

Anne didn't know what to say, so she stayed silent.

The moment stretched.

Finally he smiled, just a quick twist of the lips. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to die?" Moving in a leisurely fashion, he reached for her jaw, clearly intending to expose her throat again.

No, Anne thought. Using that unexpected bit of resilience that had sustained her before, she snapped at his approaching hand. She missed the hand itself but caught the inside of his wrist, and she dug her teeth into his flesh with all the ferocity that she could manage. Some new part of her, to her own surprise, sang with glee.

He hissed but didn't try to pull away. Perhaps he'd been caught by the same paralysis that she'd felt before.

The blood gushed from his wrist, and she decided she must have breached an artery, or a vein. Well, good.

He was struggling now, but weakly. Perhaps the shock of being shot six times had finally caught up with him; perhaps the blow to his head had been worse than she'd thought at first. She didn't care; she was simply grateful to be winning their fight, for once.

The blood flowed into her mouth, and she swallowed so as not to choke. He kept trying to pull his arm away from her, but every flex of his muscles seemed merely to prevent the wound from closing. Instead of succeeding in getting away, he merely bled more. A fierce triumph swelled through her.

She would have been glad to tear at his wrist until he died of blood loss, but with what seemed a supreme effort, he finally managed to pull away from her. Climbing to his feet, he backed away toward the door.

She licked her lips and tensed, calculating whether she could spring for him and bring him down again. Her own previous dizziness and weakness seemed to have disappeared. She felt strong, vibrant.

"Don't try," he warned her.

Ignoring him, Anne sat up slowly.

"I'll be back later," he promised her. Then he moved backward so quickly that she couldn't quite follow the motion. Her bedroom door slammed between them even as she sprang forward.

It took her only a second to grab the knob and yank the door open again. But by that time, the house was empty.

Daybreaker. She was a Daybreaker. A formally inducted member of Circle Daybreak.

Well, that changed everything, didn't it?

Meanwhile, Farro was having an interesting time.

In accordance with his instructions from the Night World council, he'd agreed to meet with the witch who'd originally alerted the council to the presence of Hunter Farmer's daughter. Ivy Greer, high school student and Circle Midnight member, was currently looking meaningfully at him across their small bar table in the tiny Black Iris club.

"I assure you that the Night World council is doing everything appropriate to take care of the problem," he told her.

"But it isn't being taken care of," Ivy Greer pointed out. "Or, at least, it hasn't been taken care of yet. Samuel Gregory won't do anything. He says he'll take care of things, but he could have killed her long before this."

"He's following the council's orders, which may involve more than you know about. It's not for non-members of the council to question its orders."

"I'm not questioning its orders," Ivy protested. "I'm just saying that Samuel Gregory isn't a good hit man. He's had plenty of chances to take her out, and he hasn't."

Briefly, Farro wondered if he should take offense at the slang-like "hit man." They were assassins. But he decided against it. The Night World council had sent him here to assure this witch that it was still in control of the situation. He wasn't her English teacher, and it wasn't his job to teach her the proper use of her own language.

"Samuel follows the Night World council's orders," he repeated. "Which may involve many more tasks than merely killing Anne Jamison. Although the council wishes to thank you for bringing this situation to its attention, it believes it is fully capable of carrying matters forward without your further assistance."

Farro knew he wasn't terribly good with diplomatic language, so he was rather pleased at how he'd managed to say "shut up and get lost."

Ivy didn't seem to be getting the point, though. Rather than nodding, thanking him for the drink he'd bought her, and retreating shamefacedly, she glared at him.

"The only thing that anyone's managed to do so far about 'this situation' is to shoot Anne Jamison's mother. And I did that. Not Samuel Gregory. If he told you he did, he's lying."

Farro blinked. Samuel had mentioned the incident, but he'd said he hadn't been responsible.

"Why did you shoot Ms. Jamison?"

"Someone had to do something!"

"Such as shooting the target's mother? Why not just shoot the target?"

"She's always been with Amaranth or Mary," Ivy muttered. "And they're Nightworlders. I couldn't shoot them."

In the centuries since he'd become a vampire, Farro had learned to think of humans as vermin, but he was always slightly jolted when hearing Nightworlders casually refer to killing humans. It wasn't as if they were mindless animals, after all. He'd learned not to wince when Nightworlders used humans for food, or for spells—he'd used them for food countless times himself—but he still disliked the idea that Nightworlders could legitimately kill humans in any way they pleased.

He was an assassin, after all. Killing was his business. It wasn't the business of random members of Circle Midnight. They weren't professionals.

"Still, why shoot the target's mother? It could only have the effect of alarming the target and causing her to be more on her guard. The only thing you've done is make Samuel's job more difficult."

"So what? He's supposed to be a great assassin, isn't he? And she's just a vermin. Any Nightworlder ought to be able to take care of her."

Farro collected his fraying patience. "The council sent Samuel to take care of the situation. That meant that you were supposed to stay out of it while he carried out the council's orders. Instead, you shot a person close to the target and alerted the target to her danger. This is after you set a bomb in your school, which was an incredibly stupid and wasteful way of taking out a single person. It also was highly visible and attracted the attention of the news media across the entire country. The Night World is supposed to be a secret, don't you know? You couldn't have been more conspicuous if you were a member of Circle Daybreak."

Hearing his own words, he frowned inwards. Ivy had contacted the Night World council about her discovery of Anne's existence, as had been proper. No one had said she'd violated any Night World rules. And yet, when he thought about it, Ivy seemed to be scattering clues about the Night World's presence right and left. Bombs, shootings—even the most dimwitted humans must be aware that something unusual was going on. The humans' police would be thinking that someone was attempting murder, and they'd be looking hard for their suspect.

The Night World was good at suppressing clues about its existence that came to light. But if it had believed it could suppress them all, there wouldn't have been any need for the rule of secrecy. In Farro's opinion, Ivy was putting entirely too much faith in the council's ability to clean up her security breaches.

"Someone had to do something!" Ivy insisted. "There's nothing wrong with killing vermin. Especially not when it's to protect ourselves. We need to defend ourselves from them. And Anne's a slayer's daughter; who knows what she might have inherited from him? And her mother might know about Hunter Farmer too. Their house could be a hotbed of slayer activity!"

Farro sighed. He supposed it was possible, but he doubted it. Neither Anne nor her mother had shown any signs of being slayers before now.

"You reported to the council that Anne had just discovered she was Hunter Farmer's daughter," he observed. "That doesn't sound as if she'd been a slayer before. Or that her mother was."

"You never know," Ivy said stubbornly. "And it wasn't worth the risk. They're both better dead."

"Maybe, but that's for the Night World council to decide, and for Samuel to carry out." Farro returned to the central point. "Not you."

"What kind of protection is the council giving us?" Now Ivy sounded angry. "We're risking our lives here, living among people who are related to one of the most famous slayers of all time. We ask the council for help, and it sends a hit man who doesn't do anything. There are traitor Daybreakers around here too, but nobody has ever done anything about them either. Then I do something to save us all, and you sit there and give me a lecture about how I should have just sat back and let you guys handle everything!"

Farro looked impassively at her flushed face.

"Ms. Greer. It's not for you to question the Night World council's orders. Just to obey them. You may not like those orders. You may think that they are stupid. But unless you plan to rebel and join the Daybreakers yourself, you have to obey the council. The council is the Night World's government, and good little citizens obey their government."

"Maybe I'm not a good little citizen," Ivy muttered. "Maybe I'm a person who can think for herself."

Vampire hearing could easily pick up a witch's rebellious mutter across a small bar table. "I believe that's what the Daybreakers say. That they just think for themselves."

"I'm not a traitor. It's Samuel Gregory who's the traitor. He's the one who's not doing anything."

"For the last time—"

"Oh, come off it, why don't you?" Ivy flashed. "If the council thinks that Samuel Gregory is doing everything right, then why did they send you here?"

In the ensuing pause, she pushed on triumphantly, "You know he's not carrying out the council's orders. Maybe he's even disobeying them. When he first came here, he wasn't interested in anything I had to tell him about Anne Jamison. He didn't want my help in taking care of her. Maybe that was because he was a Daybreaker himself. Maybe he's been fooling the council all this time, and he's really a spy in their midst. Or something like that."

"I think," Farro said coldly, "that you ought to drop the subject. And never question Samuel's loyalty again."

"Why not? What's he going to do—stand around and stare at me for the rest of my life?" Ivy laughed mirthlessly. "He never does anything. I'm the only one who's done anything around here. The Night World council should make me one of its assassins instead of him."

The roll of Farro's eyes was involuntary, but it had disastrous results.

"You don't take me seriously, do you?" Ivy's anger was becoming poisonous. "You don't think I can do anything because I'm female? Or because I'm a witch and not a vampire?"

"I take you seriously."

"But when I'm the only one who actually does something, you get angry at me and tell me to stop. Shut up, fall into line, let the great Samuel Gregory take care of things, when he obviously isn't taking care of them at all. Are you a Daybreaker, too? Both of you together? I should call the council and tell them what a mess you two are making. How the two of you together can't manage to kill one stupid vermin."

When she paused to draw breath, Farro kept his response mild. "Let me order you another drink."

"I don't need another drink. I need someone to do something. Or to appreciate what I've done, instead of blaming me for it!"

Farro glanced toward the bartender and gestured.

"Do you really think that I'll just shut up and be a good little witch if you buy me another drink?"

"No. But have the drink anyway." Farro kept his tone even.

The bartender approached.

"I've warned you," Ivy said. She stood and grabbed her coat. The bartender stepped out of the way hastily as Ivy pushed her arms into the coat's sleeves without taking her eyes from Farro.

Farro watched her as she stomped across the room to the door. It was doubtless intended to be a grand exit. He'd seen better, though.

"Never mind," he told the bartender, smiling apologetically. The bartender shrugged and retreated.

Farro paid for their drinks, left a large tip, and exited.

He'd known that Ivy hadn't gone far. She stood out to his vampire senses, almost-but-not-quite human. She was waiting outside, probably for the friend or taxi she'd called to pick her up. Seeing him come out the club's doors, she ostentatiously ignored him. Night had fallen while they'd been inside, and Farro felt the welcome chill of the late November air on his face.

"Ivy," he said, walking up to her.

She continued to ignore him.

"Look," he said, touching her bare wrist lightly with his gloved fingers. "I'm sorry for what I said before."

He could see her debate within herself whether to continue ignoring him. The opportunity he'd given her, however, was too tempting.

"I accept your apology," she finally said. She sounded as if she thought she was giving him much more than he deserved. "But I still think—"

Her voice drifted off, and she swayed.

"You think you should come with me," Farro said gently.

"Yes. . . ."

He wrapped his gloved fingers more firmly around her skin, allowing the potion soaked into the leather to seep more thoroughly into her system, and led her away.

He stopped only when they were in the underbrush and away from the glaring streetlights. It was no coincidence, of course, that there was underbrush growing near the club. Vampires usually ensured that there were private places near the black flower clubs. Most vampires preferred to feed in private.

He heard an approaching car and paused to see whether Ivy had called a taxi or a friend. A taxi. Well, that was best. The driver would look around briefly and then assume that his fare had found another ride. A friend might have been more persistent. But Farro thought he could safely ignore the taxi driver.

He stayed quite a long time in the underbrush, long after the taxi driver had driven away in disgust.

When he finally left, he was carrying a black plastic garbage bag. He supported it from underneath, as if it were heavy enough that the plastic might otherwise break. When he reached the car, the bag went into the trunk. Farro drove back to his hotel, where he consulted a map and a phone book. He then returned to the car and drove out of town. When he reached the landfill he'd been looking for, he parked, took the garbage bag from the car's trunk, and placed it in the landfill. He was careful to set it down gently and not merely toss it in, as that might have caused the bag to break. He did not want the bag's contents to be visible when the landfill workers arrived in the morning.

As he drove back to the hotel, he felt mild regret. Killing Nightworlders tended to have more consequences than killing vermin. He might have to explain his actions to the Night World council.

Still. In her own way, she'd violated the rules. And she'd been stupid enough to threaten both Samuel and himself.

Enforcing rules was what the Night World assassins were all about.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

"Did you hear?"

"Hear what?" Anne asked warily.

It was between classes, and she was exchanging her books at her locker. It wasn't usual for Amaranth to stop by, as Amaranth's locker was halfway across the school. Something was clearly up.

"Ivy Greer has disappeared."

"What?"

Amaranth nodded. "She hasn't been in any of her classes for two days."

Anne pushed her hair back from her face and tried to think. It was hard. It was probably just the worry and stress over her mother's shooting, but she had felt mildly sick for a couple of days now. It was difficult to concentrate on what Amaranth was saying.

"Maybe she's just home with the flu," she suggested.

"No, her mother called me to ask if I'd seen her. She's disappeared."

Anne took another deep breath and forced herself to focus. "Maybe she's. . . ."

She stopped. She'd forgotten what she was about to say. A slight cramp pulled at her leg, and she bent to massage it. When she straightened, she felt dizzy, just for a second, as if she'd stood up too fast.

"I did a scrying spell during homeroom," Amaranth was saying. "Just a small one, so no one would notice. I got a Coke from a vending machine and spilled a little on my desk to make a dark pool to see in. And I couldn't see anything, but I had a really bad feeling. I think something bad has happened to her."

Another cramp tugged at Anne's leg. She shifted her weight and tried to stretch the muscle out. It was really hard to concentrate on what Amaranth was saying.

"Maybe Samuel killed her," she suggested.

"I . . . I think maybe you're right. That was the sense I got, anyway."

Anne stopped shifting from one leg to the other and blinked. She hadn't really meant what she'd said.

"I thought Ivy was one of the bad guys," she said slowly. "Why would Samuel kill her?"

"Who knows why he does anything? Why did he shoot your mother? That doesn't make sense, either."

Hearing Amaranth mention her mother, Anne felt the familiar wave of anger. Yes, Samuel Gregory did whatever the council told him, no matter who was hurt, or how, or why. If they'd told him to kill Ivy Greer, he'd have done it. Nothing would have mattered to him other than that he'd received an order.

Ivy probably wouldn't have been expecting a Night World assassin to turn on her. She wouldn't have known to defend herself from Samuel.

Even though Ivy had set the bomb that had almost killed Anne and everyone else in her English class, Anne found herself feeling a little sorry for the other girl. Samuel had probably lured her somewhere isolated and then betrayed her and killed her. Maybe he'd even tortured her as well. No one deserved to be tortured, not even Circle Midnight witches who set bombs.

Another reason for her to kill Samuel. As if she needed any more.

The bell rang just then. Amaranth grimaced.

"I'll see you at lunch!" she called, already walking hastily away.

"Bye," Anne said, mechanically. Amaranth was already too far away to hear.

Anne gathered her books and headed toward her own class. In a way, Ivy's death answered a question she'd had. Why hadn't Samuel Gregory returned, as he'd promised, to kill her? He'd given her two days, but three days had passed since then. She'd had an extra day. Why?

She'd been thinking that it was because she'd wounded him when he had attacked her in her bedroom. Maybe he'd needed some time to recover fully. But now she thought she understood the real reason. He'd been out killing Ivy Greer.

Somehow, she had to stop him. Before he killed anyone else. Before he tried to kill her mother again, or her friends. Before he could kill her.

The plan they formed to ambush and kill Samuel Gregory was very simple.

Anne would reply to the email Samuel had sent her before. She'd offer to meet him at a coffee shop after dark, to negotiate. Samuel would probably come. At least, they hoped he would. Anne would sit at the plate-glass window so that he could see she was alone.

Amaranth's idea was that Samuel would be more confident, maybe careless, if he saw Anne sitting alone in the coffee shop. He wouldn't notice Amaranth and Mary and Neil lurking outside in the shadows. Using Amaranth's spells, Mary's shifter abilities, and Neil's general talents, they'd attack him as he approached. Anne would then rush outside and help with the attack. They'd try to get Samuel in such a way that no one noticed what was happening, but Amaranth would be able to cast a forgetting spell on anyone who got too close.

"What if you get knocked unconscious?" Neil asked Amaranth.

"I don't know. Maybe it won't matter. Everyone thinks something weird is going on at this school, anyway. Bombs, Ms. Jamison's shooting, Ivy's disappearance . . . this will just be one more thing."

She didn't sound very certain, and Anne didn't feel very certain, either. They needed Amaranth's ability to cast forgetting spells to get away with this. Without Amaranth, they might all be picked up by the police and put in jail.

But it was better being in jail than being killed by Samuel Gregory. She had to do something. They all had to do something. Circle Daybreak couldn't just sit back and wait to be picked off by Night World assassins.

She sent the email while everyone watched. Then they all waited for an answer.

None came.

"We'd better go ahead with the plan anyway," Amaranth decided, when it was half an hour before the time Anne had promised to be at the coffee shop. "Maybe he's gotten the email and just isn't going to answer it."

"I guess we can add 'rude' to the list of his other bad qualities," Neil said. No one laughed.

They set out through the twilight to the coffee shop. Mary and Neil each carried a wooden sword. Amaranth had a bag of charms and potions with her. Anne, in keeping with her role as bait, carried nothing, not even her purse. She had to look unarmed, or Samuel might get suspicious.

At the coffee shop, she ordered a latte, paid for it, and sat a table in front of the window and near the door. She felt sick and tense, and she wished that someone would turn off the music that was being piped through the store's stereo system.

One bullet and a rifle with a laser sight. That was all that Samuel Gregory had said he'd need to kill someone. And she was sitting right here, in plain sight, a perfect target. He'd already shot her mother, so she knew he had a gun.

Sitting still and staring into the froth of her latte was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do in her entire life. She didn't dare raise it to sip. If he was watching, he'd see how badly her hand was shaking. If he was going to kill her, she didn't want him to see her terrified as well.

The new small wild part of her rose up and told her that she wasn't going to die. That she would attack and kill Samuel Gregory before she'd let him murder her. She ought to be out there, lurking with her Daybreak friends and waiting for her prey to show up.

But that wasn't the plan. So she sat, stared into her latte, and imagined all the vicious, bloody things she'd do to Samuel Gregory after he arrived and the others had ambushed him.

It was strangely exciting.

The vampire who kept his true name secret but called himself "Samuel Gregory" approached the coffee shop.

He did not trust this sudden request from his target to meet and talk. She didn't have anything more to say to him; she'd made that abundantly clear when she'd shot him repeatedly a couple of nights ago. She probably was intending some other attack now.

On the other hand, she'd chosen a place where there would be witnesses. Surely she didn't intend to try shooting him in a brightly-lit coffee shop with a dozen other customers watching?

And he knew that she'd tasted his blood not once, but twice. He thought she'd probably be feeling some effects by now. She'd be dizzy if she stood too quickly. She'd be less interested in sleeping at night and more lethargic during the day. She might be suffering from occasional mild cramps as his vampire blood overcame her own oxygen-carrying cells.

Almost certainly, she'd be feeling sick and weak. The transformation from human vermin to vampire was a deadly one. He remembered it more clearly than he remembered most things from his pre-vampire life. It had not been pleasant. He didn't think any made vampire had ever enjoyed a truly pleasant transformation.

She might simply be wanting to speak to him about the changes she felt in herself. If that was what she wanted, he owed an explanation to her. To a true vermin, he would never owe anything, but to a budding Nightworlder, he owed as much courtesy as his duties to the council would allow him.

They'd told him to kill her, but they hadn't told him not to talk to her. In fact, he was supposed to talk to her, to get as much information from her as he could about her Daybreak friends.

So he approached the coffee shop casually, alert but not really expecting an attack. He saw her sitting at a small table in front of the store window, head bent over a tall paper cup, and he slowed slightly to observe her more closely as he drew near.

Thus, he completely failed to spot and avoid the ball of orange fire that struck him and knocked him sprawling.

Out of the corner of her eye, Anne saw a bright flash. She jerked toward the window and, at the same time, heard a light thud. The noise might not have caught her attention at any other time, but she was certain that it meant the fight had begun.

Abandoning her latte, she raced for the door.

She checked her dash on the doorstep. In that second-long pause, she saw Samuel Gregory sprawled in the parking lot with orange sparks dissolving eerily over him. Amaranth was running forward from where she'd hidden herself behind a tree. Anne couldn't see Mary.

Neil was even closer to Samuel. He'd been walking through the parking lot, certain that Samuel wouldn't be able to detect any Night World energies coming from him. Now, he'd withdrawn the wooden sword he'd kept hidden beneath his coat and was lifting it to bring it down on Samuel.

Anne started to run toward the two. She didn't have any weapon, but it didn't matter. She was ready to attack Samuel with her bare hands, if she had to.

But Samuel was already rolling away from Neil's blow. In a single incredibly graceful move that Anne wouldn't have believed if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes, he was on his feet even as Neil stabbed empty air.

Neil snarled and took a swipe that was clearly designed to cut Samuel's stomach open. But Samuel stepped forward, grabbed Neil's wrist, and twisted before the blow could land. Neil screamed, and then somehow Samuel had the sword and Neil was stumbling backward.

Anne was still several car lengths away.

Another ball of orange fire spun past her, and she ducked and swerved instinctively. Samuel ducked, too, but Neil was in his path, and the ball struck his leg glancingly before it sped past and struck a car. For an instant, Anne's eyes were pulled to the car as it sparked and coruscated with energy. She was afraid it would catch fire, but the orange fire began to die to sparks almost instantly.

She looked back to Samuel Gregory and Neil.

Neil was getting to his feet, gasping and obviously in pain. Samuel, however, was no longer there. Anne turned.

In that brief time, Samuel had closed the distance between himself and Amaranth. Amaranth had lifted her hands, probably for a third attempt at orange fire, but Samuel seized them and jerked them apart roughly. Amaranth cried out, and the spark that had been sizzling in her cupped palms flared and disappeared.

Anne changed direction and started to run toward them. But just then, she heard a roar.

It was the sound of a very large animal, and it made Anne jerk back, just for a second, as she tried to guess where it was coming from. And then she saw it, a huge animal that looked like a gigantic dog but moved like a cat. It bounded through the puddles of orange-yellow light at the foot of the lamposts, and Anne could see that it had tawny fur, like a lion.

Mary, she thought, stunned. Her name is Mary Lyon.

Everything was happening unbelievably quickly. Neil was staggering forward, but he was clutching his arm and clearly not going to be of any use. Mary was almost close enough to Samuel and Amaranth to spring, but Samuel was holding Amaranth and dragging her in front of him, swinging her off her feet as if she weighed nothing at all. . . .

Then Samuel simply picked Amaranth up, as Mary did spring, and he threw the stunned witch directly at the lion.

Shifter and witch collided in midair and fell to the ground as Samuel darted aside.

"No!" cried Anne, before she could stop herself.

The two tangled figures lay motionless on the asphalt. Neither one was getting up.

Anne ran. When she reached them, Mary was scrabbling to get her feet under her. She looked dazed but unhurt. Amaranth, however, wasn't moving. Her eyes were shut. Anne knelt and leaned to touch Amaranth's hand. Amaranth didn't respond.

"Don't move her." That was Neil, bending over them.

"Are you all right?"

"I think my arm is broken."

"Oh, God." Anne wanted to cry, and shake, and scream.

She looked around. Samuel Gregory was nowhere to be seen. A stream of people had come out of the coffee shop after her, and several of them were already frantically punching buttons on their cell phones. Calling the police, calling an ambulance.

She looked around for Mary and saw the lion's yellow body moving stealthily away through the parked cars. Good. Mary was probably all right, and they didn't need for anyone to find a lion in a coffee shop's parking lot.

Anne looked at Amaranth again. She didn't seem to be bleeding anywhere, but she was still lying perfectly still, and her eyes were still closed.

"She probably got a concussion when she hit Mary," Neil said. "He threw her head-first."

"Did he?" Anne hadn't caught that detail. She just remembered the horrible sight of Samuel lifting Amaranth as if she weighed no more than the average backpack and throwing her into the path of the springing lion.

"Yeah." Neil's face was very pale. "Do you know something?" he went on, almost conversationally. "A broken arm hurts. A lot."

"I'm so sorry," Anne said helplessly. "You all got hurt because of me. I'm so sorry."

"I've never had a broken arm before," Neil went on, as if he hadn't heard her. Maybe he hadn't. "It really does hurt."

"I'm so sorry."

"I wonder if it's a simple break, or a compound one? I think you have to put steel clips in, sometimes, if it's a compound break."

"Stop it!" Anne cried, before she could stop herself. "I said I was sorry!"

A shadow fell across them, and she flinched back. But it was some of the customers from the coffee shop, coming to help. And then the police arrived, and the paramedics, and they took Neil and the unconscious Amaranth away. Mary didn't return, and Anne had no opportunity to say anything privately to Neil.

She told the police that she'd seen something outside of the window and had run out to see what was happening. Since everyone else in the coffee shop told the same story—with variations about large yellow dogs and orange balls of lightning—the police let her go.

Anne went straight to the hospital. She couldn't find anyone who would tell her about Amaranth or Neil. She wasn't a relative, and she could tell that the nurses just thought she was a troublesome teenager. Eventually, she gave up and went to her mother's room.

"Hi, darling," her mother said. She was watching television, but she pushed the "off" button on the remote when Anne walked in. "I didn't expect to see you tonight. Homework all done?"

"Yes."

"I've got some good news. The doctors say they'll probably release me the day after tomorrow."

"That's great."

Ms. Jamison probably heard the lack of enthusiasm in her daughter's voice. "Is everything all right? You look upset."

Anne looked at her mother's still-pale face. She didn't know what to say. The whole story was unbelievable, and it had grown too far for her to know where to begin. Even if she had been free to tell her mother about the Night World, she wouldn't have known how.

"I'm okay." She sat down on the chair next to the bed, though, and took the hand that her mother held out to her.

"Sure?"

"Yes. Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Is it okay if I spend the night on the chair here again?"

Ms. Jamison looked at her daughter's drawn face. This shooting has been hard on her, she thought. Anne's had to face some unpleasant facts about how we don't live forever. It's hard on a teenager to see her mother in the hospital.

"All right," she said gently, and squeezed Anne's hand gently. She saw a little of the dull despair leave her daughter's face, and was relieved.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

"My God. What happened to you?"

Samuel Gregory's eyes flicked from his own reflection in the bathroom mirror to the reflection of Farro's face over his shoulder.

"I got burned," he said, setting down the tube of ointment and turning away from the mirror.

"Some fire," Farro said. "A witch?"

"Yes."

"Smells like witchfire."

Samuel didn't answer. Brushing past Farro, he left the bathroom and went to lie on the bed. The connecting door between their rooms was open, although it had been locked the last time he'd noticed. Well, that was one of the prices of having a friend who could pick locks.

Farro followed Samuel, though he didn't sit or lie on the bed. Instead, he leaned against the sliding mirrored door of the closet and stared at the older vampire.

"Are you all right?"

"Why do you think I wouldn't be?"

"The fact that you're limping?"

"It's nothing."

"How long ago did she strike you?" Samuel didn't answer. Farro persisted. "If you're still limping after a few hours, it's not 'nothing.'"

"Witchfire can hurt a vampire more than most things. It doesn't mean that I'm about to die of it. It's not as bad as wood."

"It's not good, either." Farro leaned out to touch Samuel's leg. Samuel jerked away before the touch could connect. Farro straightened.

"You're hurt worse than you would admit."

"I'll heal."

"Yes, we always heal, but it can take time, if it's witchfire. Who did this?"

Samuel didn't answer.

"You might as well tell me now, because I'm going to stay here and pester you until you give in."

"Farro. Leave it."

"No."

"Why on earth not?" Samuel's exasperation broke through the calm tone he had intended to use.

"Because the council sent me here to clean matters up. Which may include killing you, if you don't seem to be following the council's orders."

"You don't want to try to kill me," Samuel said, almost pleasantly.

Farro ignored the undertones. "No, I don't want to. Haven't I said that all along? You've done me favors in the past, and I'd rather work with you than any of the other assassins. But I've told you that I won't stick my neck out on your account. Not much further, anyway."

"So do whatever you think you must." Samuel closed his eyes.

"What I want to know is what's going on. Is that so much to ask? And if you won't tell me, then what am I supposed to think?" When Samuel was silent, Farro went on. "Are you violating your oath?"

Samuel opened his eyes. "Never."

"Then you ought to be able to tell me what happened and how you managed to end up burned with witchfire so badly that you still haven't healed from it."

Samuel sighed.

"Talk," Farro said, unrelenting.

Samuel did.

"Anne?"

Although the voice hadn't been loud, Anne woke up hastily. She hadn't been sleeping deeply. The big chair in the corner of her mother's room pulled out and down to make a narrow bed, but it wasn't really comfortable.

To her relief, she saw that it was Mary bending over her.

"Sh." Mary gestured, and Anne hastily grabbed her shoes and followed Mary outside into the hall. Behind them, Anne's mother slept peacefully.

There was a chair by the nurses' station. Anne sat there and tied her shoes while Mary talked.

"They released Neil late last night. It was just a simple break, nothing too bad. They gave him a bunch of drugs for the pain, though, and he's home asleep now."

"What about Amaranth?"

Mary hesitated. "She's still unconscious."

Anne felt her stomach plunge. "No."

"She may wake up soon," Mary said. "The doctors don't know."

"But do they think she'll be all right? That it's just temporary?"

Mary paused again before answering. "They say that it's hard to tell with head wounds. She might wake up any minute, or . . . well, she might stay in a coma for a long time."

"A coma?"

"Technically, she's in a coma now. It's a coma if you're unconscious. But most comas are very short," Mary added hastily. "Lots of people wake up after a day or two."

Anne was silent. She didn't know what to say.

"Her parents are with her now," Mary offered, after a few seconds. "They're . . . you know. Like Amaranth."

"So they might be able to help her? In, um, their special ways?"

"They think so. No one's giving up hope yet," Mary assured Anne earnestly. "She'll probably be fine."

Anne wished that Mary had said so right away, instead of saying that Amaranth was still in a coma and that her parents were using their witch powers to bring her back to consciousness.

"What are we going to do now?" she voiced her thoughts.

Mary took a deep breath. "We'll try to stay safe. To protect Amaranth and Neil, while they can't protect themselves."

"Can we—" Anne noticed how close they were to the station nurse, and she stood and walked with Mary a little way down the hall. "Can we call some other people from Daybreak to help us?"

"I don't know." Mary sounded unhappier than Anne had ever heard her before. "Amaranth was the one who had the Daybreak contacts. I really don't know who to call."

"You don't?" Anne was startled. She'd assumed that both Amaranth and Mary, as Nightworlders by birth, knew all about Circle Daybreak and had friends in it.

"No. Most of us don't know much. For secrecy reasons," Mary explained. "If someone from the Night World council catches us and questions us, we can't betray too many other people. Amaranth was the only one who had email addresses and phone numbers."

"And she's unconscious." Anne thought rapidly. "Does she have an address book? Somewhere that she might have written the addresses down?"

"I don't know."

"Can we get into her house to look? We've got to try."

"I can tell her parents that I left some of my homework in her room. They might give me a key."

"Good." Anne felt better. They had a plan now, and it could work. If they could find even a single Daybreak address or phone number, they could call for help. Surely Daybreak would send someone to rescue them.

"I'll go see if I can get the key. If you wait here, they won't know you're involved."

"Okay." That was fine with Anne.

Mary came back in twenty minutes, beaming and holding a house key in her hand. "We've got a couple of hours. Amaranth's father said that they might have to go back to the house to get some things that they need, but that they'd keep trying what they're doing for a while first."

A couple of hours later, though, they were both tired and discouraged.

"We've looked everywhere," Anne said. They had. Under the mattress, in the closet, in all the drawers of Amaranth's dresser and her desk and in her books.

"Maybe she kept the addresses only in her head. Memorizing them would be safest." Mary collapsed on the bed, looking exhausted. Anne wondered briefly if her friend had gotten any sleep that night.

"Would the addresses be in her email account?"

"Maybe. But I don't know her password."

"Could we find a hacker?" Anne asked hopefully. "Someone who could hack into her account?"

"I don't know. Do you know how to find a hacker?"

Anne didn't. She knew lots of people who spent lots of time online, but she doubted that any of them knew how to break into someone's email account without a password.

"Maybe we could persuade a network administrator to give us her password?"

"Persuading people is a witch skill." Mary sounded very tired. "Amaranth might have been able to do it. But if Amaranth were here to do it—"

"—we wouldn't need her to persuade the network administrator," Anne finished gloomily.

"We might go back to the hospital," Mary offered, after a silent minute. "Maybe Amaranth's woken up."

It was a faint hope, but better than nothing. When they reached the hospital, though, the nurses told them that there had been no change in Amaranth's condition.

"This is my fault," Mary said unhappily, as they wandered away. "If I had waited, not jumped for Samuel Gregory right then. . . ."

"It wasn't your fault," Anne said, trying to comfort her. "It was his fault. You didn't make him throw Amaranth at you."

"But he wouldn't have done that if we hadn't been attacking him. And it was horrible. I felt her head hit my shoulder, and I knew right away that it was too hard. Witches aren't as strong as shifters or vampires, and I knew right away that she might be hurt. But it was too late."

"Hey," Anne said, frightened for the first time by Mary's tone. She'd never heard the shifter girl sound so despairing and guilty before. "It wasn't your fault. Really."

"It was. I should have waited. Or I should have been there earlier. But I didn't want to change before he arrived. I was afraid he would smell the lion, and there was absolutely no reason why a lion would be there unless it was a shifter, and he would have guessed right away what was going on."

"It wasn't your fault," Anne repeated, as forcefully as she could. "You were trying to help. Everything that happened was his fault. He was trying to kill us all."

Mary shook her head. "If he had really been trying to kill us, we'd all be dead."

"Not you. You could have fought him off. I mean, you were a lion. He's only a vampire."

Mary shook her head again, but Anne thought she looked a little less troubled. "It's kind of you to say that, but . . . I don't know. Vampires are very hard to kill, even for shifters. And he's an assassin, while I've never actually . . . killed anyone before. I don't even change often, not really. It's too risky when you have a form that humans would notice."

"Still," Anne said comfortingly, "you're big and strong when you're a lion. I'd be scared of you, even if I were a vampire."

Mary smiled faintly. "Thanks."

"Maybe," Anne said thoughtfully, "we might be able to get Amaranth's password from the school computers. If she checked her email at school, maybe there'd be a record of it in the computer system there?"

"She might not have checked her email there," Mary said dubiously. "Or sent a message to anyone in the Night World. She might have been worried that someone would look over her shoulder at the wrong minute, or that one of the counselors would read her email."

"Or the principal," Anne said, remembering how frightened she'd been to find herself waking up in the counselor's office with the principal standing over her.

"Oh, the principal's a Nightworlder."

"He's what?" Anne's voice rose on the last word in spite of herself, and she saw annoyed nurses' faces turning toward her. Even in the hospital's hallways, you were supposed to be quiet.

"He's a vampire, a lamia. I thought you knew," Mary added, when Anne simply stared at her.

"No. How would I know?"

"I thought Amaranth would have told you."

"No. She never said that much about other Nightworlders." Anne's mind was racing. "So when he called a fire drill right before the bomb went off . . . did he know?"

Mary opened her mouth and then shut it again without saying anything. Her slightly heavy face looked disturbed. "I don't know."

"Can we get into the school computer system without his knowing? Because maybe he's in league with the Night World council, or Circle Midnight, or whatever."

Mary shrugged. "We can try."

They tried. They failed.

The school computer system, as it turned out, was protected with more firewalls and passwords than Anne had imagined the military used.

"They're afraid we'll get in there and change all our grades to As," one of the boys explained. "They figure teenagers have nothing better to do than try to hack their system."

Anne had to admit that she and Mary were trying to do just that. Of course, the circumstances were special. And they weren't trying to change their grades. Just to save their lives.

But nothing worked. The day ended, and Mary started to look at the lengthening shadows worriedly.

"We'd better get back to the hospital," she said at last. "I think it's safest there."

"What about Neil?" Anne imagined him at home, with no one to keep him safe but human parents who didn't know about the Night World. He might even be drugged and unable to warn them about any danger.

From the look on Mary's face, she was imagining the same thing. "What if I left you at the hospital and went to check on Neil? I can warn his parents, maybe . . . or maybe I can get them to take him back to the hospital, just for the night. . . ."

Anne didn't like the thought of their separating, but it seemed cowardly to protest that she didn't want Mary to leave her alone. Neil needed Mary more than she did. And Mary was right. Probably Samuel Gregory wouldn't want to attack her in a crowded hospital, with nurses and doctors everywhere.

"All right," she agreed.

Anne went to her mother's room first, but Ms. Jamison was dozing. Anne waited for a short time in the darkened, silent room before deciding to go check on Amaranth.

"She's still unconscious," a nurse told her.

"Can I see her?"

"Are you family?" the nurse asked, as if she was already sure the answer would be no.

"No," admitted Anne.

"Well, then—" The nurse suddenly paused and frowned. "All right."

Anne blinked. "It's all right?"

"Yes, but only for a short time, and be careful. You can talk to her, so long as you keep your voice down."

Anne couldn't believe her luck. She ducked inside Amaranth's room before the nurse could change her mind.

Amaranth was lying motionless in a bed identical to the bed in which Anne's mother was lying two floors above. Her eyes were shut, and she appeared to be sleeping. Next to her stood an IV pole with a transparent plastic bag, some tubing, and a number of mysterious red and green lights. Anne saw that Amaranth was hooked up to the IV pole by a variety of tubes and needles, and she looked away hastily. Her stomach roiled, but she forced the feeling back.

She hoped desperately that Amaranth would wake up soon. Anne couldn't bear to think that her friend might be in a coma permanently because of her.

Anne had seen a thousand movies with people getting killed. She'd read a thousand books with people getting killed. She expected violence in movies and books, and she realized that she expected to find it there. Violence was fine, even entertaining, when it was fictional.

But this moment, when she sat beside her friend's hospital bed and realized that her friend might never recover, was not entertaining at all. It was frightening and terrible and sickeningly real.

And it could just as easily have been Anne herself. She was Samuel Gregory's main target, after all.

Even if she managed to escape him, would she be here someday in a bed like this one, dying of old age or of some disease like cancer? Very possibly. Everyone died someday, and a lot of people did it in a hospital.

And would Amaranth be here again someday, too, even if she woke from her coma and was all right this time? She was a witch, not a vampire. She would grow old someday as well.

She might not even live to grow old. Circle Daybreak was disobeying the rules of the Night World, and Anne could see now that the rest of the Night World was taking Daybreak's disobedience very seriously. It was like a war. And, of course, people got killed in wars. If Amaranth continued to tell humans about the Night World, then the Night World might find out what she was doing, and it might send another assassin to kill her. The more Amaranth did to stop the prejudices and evil of the Night World, the more it was likely that they'd find her and kill her.

If Daybreak won the war, of course, then they'd all be safe. But it didn't look as if Daybreak was going to win any time soon. In the meantime, there'd be more fighting. More people would die. Any of the Daybreakers she knew could be among them—Amaranth, Mary, Neil, her. She could find herself on a hospital bed like this at any time, hooked to machines that would keep her alive while her brain was dead.

Or she could be dead and in her coffin at any time. She might be killed on the spot in a fight. She'd never really learned how to use the sword, in spite of Mary's patient training. And she'd failed pretty badly with the gun.

She was thinking about her death and the deaths of everyone near to her, so she wasn't startled at the quiet "Hello" that came from the door behind her. Even though the voice was that of Samuel Gregory.

"Hello," she answered, without turning. She kept her eyes fixed on Amaranth, the slow rise and fall of her friend's chest under the thin blankets. The monitor lights, blinking in a pattern Anne didn't know how to read.

She waited, but Samuel didn't say anything more. She didn't hear his approaching footsteps. Through the soulmate link, she could feel his presence across the room, but he seemed content to stay there, silent and watchful.

My damned soulmate, she thought, meaning it literally.

She couldn't stand putting it off any longer. She turned to face him.

"Have you come to finish what you started?" she challenged. "To kill her while she's lying there and she can't defend herself? That would probably be just like you, wouldn't it?"

She didn't know if the words were true. She didn't care any more, actually. She didn't care if she was being fair to Samuel Gregory, or not, or if they could find a way to resolve their conflict without killing one another, or not. She was tired of all the fighting, and all the violence, and the death that she saw as inevitable.

Just let's get this over with, she thought.

He'd been looking at Amaranth, not her, and she couldn't read the expression on his face. But as she spoke to him, he transferred his gaze to her.

Such a wonderful thing their soulmate connection was. In his eyes, she could see his own tiredness. A weariness as great as her own, and a similar sense that death was inevitable. Emptiness, and exhaustion, and a belief that their situation was going to end badly. That there was no possibility for them but unhappiness, in some form or another.

Great. They finally agreed on something.

She rose from the chair she'd pulled to sit beside Amaranth's bed. "I should have known you'd be willing to come kill me even in a hospital. You don't have any respect for anyone at all, do you? Not even the sick and dying."

"You're right," he said finally. His voice was quiet, but it seemed shockingly loud to her after the silence that had been broken only by the beeps of the machine and her own voice. "I don't care about the deaths of vermin."

"We are not vermin. Humans are people."

"I would have gone mad long ago, if I had believed that."

"You did go mad. You're absolutely crazy now. A crazy, insane killer. That's what you are, did you know that? An insane murdering madman."

He didn't answer. Behind Anne, Amaranth's machine continued its steady, rhythmic beeping.

"I didn't shoot your mother," he said suddenly, inconsequentially. "That was Ivy Greer. At least, my associate says so."

"Liar."

"You could use the soulmate connection to find out if I'm telling you the truth."

"You're not my soulmate," Anne said. "You're a monster. I can't have a monster as a soulmate."

He didn't seem offended, or surprised. Through the connection that she'd just denied, Anne didn't feel anything new in Samuel Gregory at all. He was still tired, and empty, and unhappily certain of what was going to happen.

"What does it say about us all, though, if I am your soulmate?" he asked. "That we change? That the old and the young can never truly connect with one another? That we all become monsters, with time?"

"Not everyone. Just you."

He smiled then, just a quick, unhappy twist of his lips. "Do you think that any other two soulmates who happened to be a teenage human and a centuries-old vampire would have had a better chance?"

"Yes."

"Well. Maybe you're right."

More agreement between them. It was such a pity, Anne thought, that they hadn't been able to agree on anything good. Only about the bad things, the horrible truths, that she'd come to accept existed.

"So have you come for Amaranth, or for me? Or for both of us?" she challenged.

"For you."

She hadn't expected anything different, but the familiar twist of physical terror at approaching death started to curdle slowly in her stomach.

He stepped forward slowly. She stepped forward as well, away from Amaranth. If she could do nothing else, she could keep their fight away from her friend. Only a few steps away, maybe, but she could have that small victory.

She noticed that he was limping, very slightly, as he walked. She hadn't noticed a limp before. If he'd been hurt in the fight, she was glad.

They were close enough to touch, now.

"I have everything I need from you already," he told her softly. "All the information you have about Daybreak. I already took it from you when I drank from you before."

"I didn't know all that much for you to take." Anne remembered, with a savage pleasure, that Amaranth had kept the Daybreak email addresses and phone numbers completely secret. Anne had failed to discover them that day, which was bad in one way but good in another. She wouldn't be able to betray anyone to Samuel Gregory. And Amaranth, who might have been forced by torture to talk, was safely unconscious.

"You didn't," he agreed. "But the point is that I don't have to torture you now."

"But you still have to kill me, right?"

"Right." But he paused, his dark eyes lingering on hers. The moment stretched unbearably.

"Well?" she challenged him. "If you're going to kill me, why don't you go ahead and do it?"

His fingers came up, cradled the back of her head and tangled in her hair. She knew, then, that he intended to drink her blood and to kill her that way. She supposed it was the natural way for a vampire to kill.

She didn't have the gun Neil had given her, or the wooden sword that she and Mary had practiced with. She was almost completely unarmed.

She was ready for him to strike at her throat. But he paused once more.

"You've changed," he said.

"I'm still me."

"Yes. But you've changed. You wouldn't have challenged me to kill you before. Remember? Before, you tried to persuade me to give up my place in the Night World and to join Circle Daybreak with you. You wanted us to have some sort of a life together. You believed that everything would be all right if I just agreed to change in a few ways."

"I know better now."

"Yes." His eyes, dark and tired, flickered across her face. "As I said. You've changed."

With no warning, then, he struck for her throat. Anne felt the pain of the penetration, the peculiar sensation of something foreign deep inside in her flesh. She prepared herself to fight back.

But darkness was rising all around her. It was faster than she had expected. Almost between one heartbeat and the next, her knees were giving way. Her hands groped clumsily for her pockets, but they never reached inside. Her eyes lost focus, then shut. Slowly, her body sagged deadweight into Samuel Gregory's arms.

He continued to drink for some time.

The door to Amaranth's room opened again, closed discreetly.

"Is it over?" Farro asked.

"More or less." Samuel Gregory straightened from the body on the floor. "I should get a gurney. It will be the least obvious way of removing her."

"I had to reinforce your command to the nurse to be elsewhere," Farro commented, walking over and bending to inspect Anne's lifeless body. "You took a while. What were you two doing so long? Having sex? Holding a debate about the meaning of life?"

"More or less?"

"Really? Which one?"

"The debate."

"Pity." Farro's eyes rested on Anne's pale face. "It's supposed to be better with a soulmate. You shouldn't have wasted your last opportunity."

"Why don't you get the gurney?"

"Why should I?" When Samuel didn't answer, Farro sighed and straightened. "Right. Feel free to pay your last respects to the dearly departed. It's not every day you kill your soulmate, is it?"

"No."

"What about the other one?"

"Which other one?"

"The Daybreak witch." Farro's eyes traveled casually to Amaranth's still figure in the bed. "She's under sentence of death too, isn't she? For having told your ex-soulmate about the Night World?"

"I want confirmation from the council first."

"Getting cautious, aren't you?"

"And if she has to be killed, then I don't want to do it here."

"Where else is better? Lots of people die in hospitals. It won't look strange for another to die, too."

"Her parents were here recently. They're Night World witches too. It's perfectly possible that they might be able to find out that her death wasn't natural."

"They're supposed to find out. They're supposed to learn that joining Daybreak brings about your execution. That's part of the idea." When Samuel Gregory didn't answer, Farro sighed. "Right. I'll go find that gurney."

"Farro?" Samuel's quiet voice stopped the other assassin as his hand touched the door handle.

"What?"

"This is over now. I've conformed to the council's orders regarding Hunter Farmer's daughter. So you can report back to them, preferably as soon as possible, that everything is under control here. I do not need any more supervision."

There was a slight pause.

"As you wish," Farro finally said. His voice was neutral. "I'll be on my way as soon as I can schedule a flight."

"Good."

As Farro's quiet footsteps retreated down the hall, Samuel Gregory continued to look down at Anne's still body.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

Anne opened her eyes slowly. She didn't feel well. She felt strange.

She found that she was lying on her back on a bed. Someone had removed her shoes and spread the covers over her, but her hair was matted uncomfortably beneath her head.

She looked around. She didn't recognize the bed or the room. It looked like a hotel room, though. There was a pastel painting of flowers on the wall that was reassuringly hotel-like.

She sat up, pushing the covers aside. Her head spun as she sat straight, but she ignored the dizziness. It passed after a moment, anyway. Standing up caused the dizziness to return, but she ignored it again. This time, though, it was more slow to pass.

Where are my shoes? she wondered. I've got to find my shoes.

She started to hunt for them, getting down on her hands and knees. She tried to look under the bed, but it seemed to be fixed to the floor on a box-like structure. Since she knew that many people kept shoes under the bed, she decided that it was worth taking the time to hunt more there thoroughly. She pushed the mattress off the box springs. No shoes were under the mattress. She pushed the box springs off the frame, and again found no shoes. She looked carefully. Then she checked the box springs and the mattress for holes where someone could have cut a slit and shoved her shoes inside. She couldn't find any. She flipped the mattress and box springs over and checked again.

She was doing this for the third time when the door opened. Anne whirled to face the door with more speed than she would have thought possible. She was completely turned around before the door had finished opening. Her vision continued to spin even when the rest of her was still, though. She ignored the dizziness once again.

Samuel Gregory entered the room and closed the door behind him. Anne glared at him.

"Where are my shoes?"

He raised his eyebrows. "I put them in the closet."

Anne looked desperately around, saw the closet door, and pounced. In a few seconds, she had her shoes safely cradled to her chest. She looked around for somewhere to sit while she put them on and finally decided on the floor. The bed, currently, in three parts, was spread around the room.

"Why did you take the bed apart?" Samuel asked her.

"What?"

"Why did you take the bed apart?"

Anne considered. She couldn't remember, and the answer didn't seem important. She wasn't even sure it had been her who had done it. Probably Samuel had done it himself, just so that he had something more to blame her for.

"You did it," she accused.

"I took the bed apart?"

"Yes. That's right." Anne nodded vigorously. The more she thought about it, the more she was sure it was true.

Samuel sighed. He continued to watch her much more closely than she thought was necessary, given that she was doing nothing more interesting than putting her shoes on and tying the laces.

Finishing, she raised her head to look at him. "What are you staring at?"

"I'll tell you what," he said, ignoring her question. "Why don't we put the bed together again?"

He always ignored her questions. She remembered that, and remembered how much she hated it.

She hated him. Now she remembered. She'd always hated him. He wanted to kill her, and he was planning on doing it. Probably as soon as she turned her back.

She decided she'd be too clever for him. When he approached and lifted a corner of the box springs, she smiled and lifted another corner. She helped him lift and pull both the box springs and the mattress into place. A good, cooperative girl, that's what she was being. Good girls made their beds in the morning. Her mother had always said that. Something was wrong with her mother now, but she couldn't remember what. The mattress and box springs weren't as heavy as she'd thought, but stooping and lifting them made her head spin worse.

"I have a headache," she said, as Samuel bent to pick up the sheets and covers which had fallen into a tangled pile on the floor. She noticed he moved with a slight limp. Had he always limped? She couldn't remember.

"I don't doubt it." He tossed the pillows on the mattress and started to untwist the sheets.

She approached. "But I'll help you anyway."

"That's nice." He continued to untangle the covers, ignoring her.

Anne's fingers dipped into her pocket and pulled out a wooden disk almost the size of her palm. She jumped forward, striking Samuel and the sheet he was holding and knocking him down. Lithe as ever, he tried to roll away and stand up, but he'd been off guard, and his legs and arms were caught in the sheet he'd been holding.

She pressed the wooden disk to his forehead. "Die!" she shouted.

And, all of a sudden, something horrible started to happen.

She could feel it through the soulmate connection. (Soulmate? Was he her soulmate? She vaguely remembered something about soulmates.) He was screaming inside as the spell that Amaranth had given her, the strong death spell that had taken days to prepare, started to work.

Ordinarily, maybe he'd have been able to fight it off. He was not just a vampire, but an assassin, and the council had provided him with spells to fight off the attacks that witches were likely to make.

But he'd been wounded by Amaranth's witchfire before, and he didn't seem to have recovered fully. And the spell that Amaranth had made and bound in the disk for Anne's use was stronger than an ordinary killing spell.

It hurt. Anne could feel the pain as it lanced through him. He was fighting the spell, and that made it worse somehow.

She didn't care. He was evil and had to die. She knew that even through her mental haze, which actually was clearing away very fast under the effect of his silent screams. She was glad that she was able to kill him.

But it hurt her too. She felt the pain as he felt it. As he suffered and grew weaker, the barriers between them grew weaker as well. Now the pain was swallowing them both up, destroying them both.

They screamed aloud together.

Anne felt herself falling into the blackness of death for the second time. But this time it was worse, much worse. She felt something wrench away from her, some vital part of herself disappear and vanish. Her soul, she thought. Part of her soul had just died.

Then, abruptly, it was over. Anne found herself panting on the floor, seated with her back against the wall. And in front of her, still tangled in the hotel's sheets, was a mummified body wearing Samuel Gregory's clothes.

She heard a door open, but she didn't react. Her eyes were still fixed on the body in the sheets. On all that remained of her soulmate, the vampire who'd called himself Samuel Gregory.

He'd never even told her his real name.

"What a mess," someone said.

She didn't turn, didn't look up. She didn't see any reason to. There was a huge hole gaping inside her. She'd never consciously noticed anything there before, never thought of words like "full" or "empty" for that part of herself.

But now there was a void within her where her soulmate had once been. He was gone, and part of her was gone as well. She could feel it.

A hand took her chin, tilted it up. Her eyes blinked and focused on the stranger. Streaked blond hair, pale skin, an indefinable air and energy that reminded her of Samuel.

Her soulmate, whom she'd killed.

"I'm Farro," he informed her. "I suppose you know that you've just killed your soulmate?"

She didn't answer.

"Right, I remember what it's like. Samuel killed my soulmate for me about a hundred years or so ago. It took a while for me to get over it. You'll get over it, too. Probably, anyway." He let go her chin and leaned over to flip some more of the covers over Samuel's mummified body. "There, you don't have to look at that any more."

But I want to, she thought. It's all I have left of him.

She moved forward to push the covers back, but Farro pushed her hands away deftly and picked up the bundled body before she could dodge around him. He deposited the bundle on the bed and pulled her away as she tried to get close.

"No, no, there's a good girl. A good assassin, I should say. You'll make a fine replacement for Samuel. Well, not at first, maybe. But in time."

What he was saying was so unexpected that it actually penetrated Anne's misery. She looked at Farro. "What?"

He smiled at her, but there was something cold and unfriendly behind his smile. "He wanted you alive, and he was my friend, and I owe him this last favor. He changed you, instead of killing you, so I'll honor his wishes and not kill you myself. You're a vampire now. Did he tell you that, before you killed him?"

Anne shook her head mutely.

"Fancy that: killing first without asking questions like 'how did I get here' and 'what's going on?' Yes, you'll make a fine assassin. You're as ruthless as he is. Was."

Anne shook her head again.

"Don't try to deny it. You're a ruthless, heartless killer. You had to be, to kill your own soulmate. And how do you think the Night World picks its assassins? Killing another assassin is actually a fairly good item to put on your resume, so to speak. They know you have potential then."

No, Anne thought. But she didn't bother to shake her head again. It was too much effort.

"He didn't want anything to do with you, but he didn't want to kill you. I could see that. He was delaying, using every excuse he could think of to give you a chance to escape. You were stupid and wouldn't take what he gave you. So he had to catch you and interrogate you, but even then he was as gentle as possible. He let you drink his blood. Maybe he was just trying to make you feel better about being his victim, or maybe he was hoping that you'd manage to drink enough to change yourself."

"He didn't let me," Anne whispered. "We fought. He was hurt."

Farro snorted. "He let you hurt him. He let you get in every blow you got. He was an assassin for centuries, and a very good one. You're a seventeen-year-old girl who knows nothing about fighting. Or you didn't, when this whole mess began." He surveyed her critically. "I don't know what he saw in you. Just the soulmate connection, I suppose."

Anne's eyes dropped involuntarily to the body on the bed. Muffled in sheets and blankets now, it looked like nothing in particular.

"You weren't just missing the physical abilities a fighter should have. You were stupid. Every step of the way, you didn't take what he offered. You didn't even spot the fact that you only got in to see Amaranth because he influenced the nurse to let you past. You were so angry with him that you never thought that someone else might have shot your mother. If he'd shot her, by the way, he'd have killed her. You think a centuries-old Night World assassin can't aim a rifle? No, that was your friend Ivy. He even told you that, but you didn't believe him."

"So kill me." Anne still couldn't manage to raise her voice above a whisper. "I'm too stupid to live, right? So kill me."

"He wanted you to live." Farro didn't look as if he agreed. "He came up with the idea that because you'd been inducted into Circle Daybreak, that made you a Nightworlder. Of sorts. There are traditionally three circles in the Night World: Midnight, Twilight, and Daybreak. So when you became part of Daybreak, you technically became a Nightworlder. He told me, a few evenings ago, that he thought he could let you live without breaking his oath."

"Why did he make me a vampire, then?"

"I don't know." Farro eyed her. "Maybe he was afraid that the Night World council wouldn't agree with his, shall we say, innovative interpretation of Night World membership, and he thought you'd have a better chance of survival as a vampire." He smiled. "Or maybe he just thought you tasted good."

Maybe he thought we would be able to be friends some day, Anne thought. When I was older. When I was more like him.

Even through her despair and emptiness, she felt sick horror at the thought of becoming like Samuel Gregory. Murderer, torturer, assassin . . . could she ever want to be like him?

She'd changed, he'd said, before he had bitten her that last time. He'd said she had changed. Past tense. Not that she would change. Whatever he'd meant, it hadn't involved the change from human to vampire that he'd been about to force on her.

But I had to learn things! she thought, as if he were still there to disagree with. Learning things is good! Learning how to defend yourself is a good thing! I had to defend myself, and my mother, and Mary and Amaranth and Neil and all the other Daybreakers! I had to learn to fight!

A distant memory brushed her mind. "I became an assassin in order to make the world a better place," he'd told her. Or something like that. She couldn't remember exactly. That had been nonsense, though.

"What did you use to kill him?" Farro asked. He stooped and hunted on the floor until he found the disk. He prodded it with a finger gently before picking it up with an expression of distaste. "Yes, a nasty thing. Witch work? If your friend ever comes out of her coma, she's likely to be a force to reckon with someday." He dropped the wooden disk into the metal trash basket, which rang slightly with the impact.

"He didn't tell me that he'd changed you instead of killing you. He wanted even me to think that you were dead. But it wasn't all that hard to figure out. I was willing to play along, but I suppose that's not possible now." He sighed.

"Come on. It's time for us to go. I need to get you somewhere safe for your transformation to finish, and you need to learn the first principles of being a vampire. The council will start to wonder if I bring an obvious novice before them and say that she killed their best and most famous assassin."

Anne's eyes went involuntarily to the lump of covers on the bed again.

"You should just kill me," she whispered.

"Oh, no. Nothing so simple as that. He wanted you to live."

She might have protested. But it was too much effort. She was still sick and dizzy—from the change, she supposed—and Farro told her that he intended to take Samuel's body with them.

"Can't leave it here for the maids to find," Farro said, picking up the bundle and slinging it casually over his shoulder.

So she trailed after Farro and stood beside him while he lowered the man-shaped bundle of sheets and blankets into the trunk of his car and closed the lid firmly. Her soulmate, or what was left of him. She'd go with Farro to bury him, or do whatever Farro intended to do with the body, because that way she'd be with her soulmate a little longer. Just a little longer, and only with his corpse, but that was the most she'd ever have now.

"Stay here," Farro told her. He reached for the passenger side door, then seemed to hesitate and think better of it.

"You haven't learned yet how to hot-wire a car, have you?"

Anne shook her head.

"And you wouldn't lie to me, would you? You'd never dream of telling me a lie? No, don't bother telling me you're innocent. Just stand here. I'll get the luggage and be back in a minute."

She stood obediently in the empty parking lot, waiting for his return. It was night—she had no idea what time, exactly—and very cold.

She heard the other car approaching and saw its lights, but she didn't know that it had anything to do with her until the car pulled up with a jerk next to Farro's. Mary jumped out, and Neil climbed out more slowly on the other side.

"Anne! Are you okay? Amaranth said you were here, but I thought she had to be wrong."

"Amaranth?" Anne said slowly. It was hard to speak, as if language itself had become unfamiliar.

"Yes! She woke up a few hours ago, and I finally got to see her. She said that she'd had a vision, that you were in great danger, and that Samuel had brought you to this hotel. Are you all right?" Mary looked closely at Anne for the first time and seemed to shrink. "Oh, Anne—"

"It's all right," Anne assured her, wrapping her numb tongue and lips carefully around the words.

"What?" That was Neil, who had walked around the car to join them.

"Is my mother all right?" Anne asked.

"I stopped by her room about an hour ago to look for you, just before I heard that Amaranth had woken up. She's fine. The doctors even say that she can leave the hospital tomorrow. Well, I guess that's today, since it's after midnight."

Anne nodded slowly. Her head felt heavy. "That's good."

"Oh, Anne—" Mary looked absolutely stricken. "You didn't want this, did you? What happened? Where's Samuel?"

"He's dead."

"Dead?"

"I killed him."

"Good," Neil said, while Mary still seemed to be struggling to find words.

"But he had a friend, and the friend's taking me somewhere safe for now, and later to the Night World council, to become the assassin to replace Samuel. No," Anne said, as Mary opened her mouth. "He'll be back in a minute, so I can't talk long." It was hard to talk at all, hard to think. "I have a plan."

"What?" Mary said, briefly, when Anne paused.

"I'm going to become an assassin. But not for real. I'll be a mole. I'll say I'll work for them, but I won't, not really. Instead, I'll work to change the Night World council from inside."

"If you can," Neil said, looking doubtful.

"Neil's right," Mary said, frowning. "What if you can't?"

"I can try," Anne said. "I can try to make the world a better place."

She remembered Samuel's words again, but she pushed them aside. This was different. She meant what she said seriously.

"Tell my mother that I'm all right," she said. "But that I can't come back. Maybe Amaranth can do a spell or something to make her feel better."

She stopped. Her head was spinning again. But she felt determined. Maybe Samuel had been right and she had changed. In her own way, she'd become ruthless. She wouldn't mind fighting ruthlessly for what she thought was right.

"I think maybe you shouldn't do this," Neil said. "Daybreak needs you. You should fight with us."

"I can do more this way."

Behind them, the hotel door opened with a hiss. They all turned to see Farro walking out with two suitcases behind him. He had to see them as well, but he didn't hurry his pace. He didn't slow down either, though.

"People can change," Mary whispered, giving Anne a quick hug. "That's what Daybreak is all about. We have faith that people can change. And when they do, the world can become a better place." She glanced quickly at Farro. "Take care." She hurried for the car. Neil was already closing his door behind him, settling for a quick wave of farewell to Anne.

Mary drove off. Farro opened the back seat, tossed the two suitcases inside, and opened the passenger side door for Anne. He made no comment about Mary and Neil, although Anne expected something. She climbed inside wordlessly, still waiting, but Farro only walked around the car and climbed into the driver's seat.

"She's right," was all he said, as he turned the key in the ignition. "People do change. But they seldom change for the better."

He backed out of the parking space, and they drove away together into the night.


End file.
